Likelihood to Recommend Azure Virtual WAN provides single functional interphase for routing, monitoring, connectivity and security operations. The connection of hubs in Azure virtual WAN makes it simple for us to use Microsoft as the pillar of our spoke connectivity. The platform provides us with robust connectivity features that allow for transitive connectivity across different spokes. However, you should always ensure you have understood your total cost of ownership to avoid potential price bombshells.
Read full review At our level, we had to optimize our 3 internet links (MPLS and LTE) with applications like O365, SAP, Microsoft CRM Dynamics and our collaborative work tools like Teams. We also had to ensure that both client workstations and servers could communicate with minimal latency with our
Microsoft Intune infrastructure.
Read full review Pros It offers a seamless experience while connecting Virtual networks and Workloads via Azure Hub. Lot of connectivity options present - site to site VPN/Express route etc. Very easy connectivity and migration with on-premise sites and Azure Hub. Read full review Meraki has been beautifully done for people who are actually very lean on the IT infrastructure as in resources wise. So Meraki is a very good solution to give them the simplicity on a single glass plan where they can actually have visibility over all their networks on a single glass plane by a click of button, they could actually see what's happening. They could actually do troubleshooting on the fly, including packet capture, which is such a smooth feature. Usually myself including I've been have an engineering background, all my ears packet capture, I've never seen that smooth and easy to operate that you can actually have a high level understanding or deep level depending on how much you want to go in with the click of a button. That's so beautiful. I mean everything for me Meraki is point of kind of a go ahead for everyone. Read full review Cons Integrations are limited within Azure. It is difficult to carry out multi-cloud integrations. If you haven't understood your monthly cost you can receive price shocks. Read full review The platform itself is very feature-rich. One of the difficulties we find is that to do things, for example, in terms of monitoring and obtaining data, it's not consistent. There are multiple interfaces to get them, but you can't get the same data through all interfaces. So you end up having to try to find either the least common denominator or we have to build our own code that then mines through all the interfaces and that becomes very problematic. The other problem we've found is that there are issues where the same amount of expected software quality isn't really there in all releases. Cisco breaks things out by like shorter or long-lived release trains. And the long-lived release trains tend to have good quality by the time you get to the second or third release within it. But then those are skips. There are like 12, 18 months skips in between those. So if you start releasing features on versions in between there practically to be safe, you have to wait until you know much later. So to be able to see new future capabilities as they come out and deploy those readily needs to improve, it needs to be much faster. Read full review Support Rating Fast and efficient. The only issue currently is that the support is only overseas support and not in South Africa, which causes delays in resolution for some cases. Escalating issues is quite simple and the opening of new cases from the dashboard is easy. I have never had a support issue that could not be resolved.
Read full review Alternatives Considered As we were already using Azure as a cloud platform, it was easy setting up a Virtual WAN inside Azure as users/developers and DevOps engineers were familiar with the user interface and functioning as compared to going to some other portal for just the VWAN solution. The umbrella of features provided by Azure Virtual WAN made it the right choice for our infrastructure.
Read full review The Sonic wall and Cisco ASA required a lot of trial and error to get up and running. Rules and configurations were difficult to setup and were not intuative. Meraki is very ituative.
Read full review Scalability Once your template is set up Meraki is easy to scale. Even creating the template is easy and I was able to learn enough in 4 hours to build, test, and deploy templates for our locations. Best part is you can stage your deployment by adding a unit to a template even before taking it out of the box.
Read full review Return on Investment Automatic troubleshooting solves incidents without costing our operational time. We are able unify all our operational activities. Read full review It was mostly around logs. I mean I understand because the aim is to provide the simplified solution to the people as an end user, be it an IT manager or the oil team. So I understand where you don't have lots of tools assigned where you can actually take help from the track. But in terms of having that logging information, I think that's where it's been a bit of a kind of journey where struggling, we have been struggling there. Read full review ScreenShots