Cisco Meraki MX Firewalls is a combined UTM and Software-Defined WAN solution. Meraki is managed via the cloud, and provides core firewall services, including site-to-site VPN, plus network monitoring.
$595
per appliance
Cisco Meraki SD-WAN
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Cisco Meraki SD-WAN is a software-defined WAN offering transport independence, application optimization, intelligent path control, and secure connectivity.
I have used OpenMesh which is no longer around.
But stacked up against Cisco Meraki MX, there was no competition. Cisco Meraki MX overall had
better features, deployment, Ease of use, and Hardware performance. One of the
I would recommend [Cisco] Meraki MX devices for any environment and they will compete against any competitor well. Years ago I used Sonicwall and Watchguard firewalls to create Site - to - Site networks and they worked well on an individual scale.
The key to Cisco Meraki being the superior product is its ease of use and cloud managed portal. Although other products do offer more knobs, the simplistic design of the Meraki portal makes it easy for any user to integrate it into their new or existing networks. It really is a …
Small office, small business, medium business even larger enterprise can work on Cisco Meraki MX if they can sacrifice some of the functionality that Cisco Meraki MX can not provide. To enhance security, I would advise combining with cloud delivered firewall.
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.
The management is the best. I'm an old-fashioned networking guy, so I'm used to going to the site itself and connecting. For example, a console cable and start and start configuring. Now since the management is so easy on Meraki I can configure everything from the headquarters from where I sit in Israel and then just go to the site and connect and basically, it's plug and play. After I configure everything from my office in Israel, I can just go to the site for a few hours, and connect everything. Just the magic happens.
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.
The way you need to segment devices by network causes you to need to go to different dropdowns to see everything at a single site. They have improved this and now allow you to add firewall, switches and wireless to create a single site, but still a bit clunky.
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.
As we have it in place now, we will continue to keep it at our remote sites. Future expansion is something we are reviewing, and may well start with some of the larger switches as they seem to offer good performance and management at a reasonable price. Wireless is also something we're investing in and their devices are great for that.
The Cisco Meraki MX series is very easy to use. Setting up user VPN access, site to site VPN to tie multiple locations together and managing all your devices. You can even download the latest firmware and install without ever leaving the dashboard. Meraki is the very definition of easy to use
I haven't ever had a bad experience with Meraki support. On the few occasions where I wasn't understanding the UI or needed some clarification about what a setting actually would do, I contacted them and they were very quickly able to provide help. Returns are simple and fast, too. We had to return a defective device one time and they shipped the replacement before we had even un-racked the one that was faulty. Unlike many other vendors, they didn't ask use to a do long list of scripted diagnostics, they just took my word for it that the device was broken and sent out a replacement immediately
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.
Overall, for a new network admin or a non-IT person, the Cisco Meraki MX is much easier to configure for a single site than the Cisco ASA Firewalls. ASA can be quicker for those with a background in Cisco command line OS.
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.
The Cisco Meraki MX is basically a good product, but not perfect. If you compare the Cisco Meraki MX with a Fortigate or Cisco Firepower, you quickly realize that this system can do less than the reference product. The Cisco Meraki MX can be used in small environments, but in large environments you have to check carefully whether it really makes sense to use it.
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.
VPN tunnel between locations has been up 99% of the time in the 7 years that I have used the Cisco Meraki MXs in my current position. That does not include ISP issues because, in my mind, that shouldn't dictate the performance of the Cisco Meraki MXs.
Sometimes we get phishing emails with malicious links in them. We are able to block the URLs on our network using the Cisco Meraki MXs, and the appliance configuration sets in less than a minute. Blocking that link for anyone over VPN or on the LAN.
The interface is really simple and configuration is a breeze, which makes deploying a new Cisco Meraki MX really fast and easy. Replacing an Cisco Meraki MX is even easier, Just remove the old and add the new and all the configuration stays for the new appliance to use. Saves so much time and money.
The biggest thing is we have not had really any issues with any of our Cisco Meraki MXs going down in the past 7 years. The reliability with these devices are amazing.
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.
