Cisco Meraki MX vs Palo Alto Networks WildFire

• The dashboard brings all management features with you wherever you are. All you need is an Internet connection and a browser and you can manage the solution. The dashboard tracks your uplink connectivity to the dashboard and double checks with you all changes impacting the connectivity, making it much safer to enact changes remotely. Dual WAN connections are greatly simplified and site-to-site VPNs automatically connect regardless of what WAN connection is active.
• Site-to-Site VPNs are the easier to setup than any other vendor’s solution. You simple pick two or more devices to tunnel together and then select what network subsets should be allowed to cross the tunnel and you are done. The solution handles all the details. Site-to-site VPNs can dynamically follow IP changes with no need for static IPs.
• For MSPs the dashboard is even more convenient as all your clients are on the same MSP account. Switching between managing different clients Meraki equipment is a few clicks once you login to the dashboard. Two-factor authentication is available for enhanced dashboard security.

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• This is could base and easily manageable for our collocation. While working within the could can review in live time potential treats that it has reported from other devices.
• Worked very well with existing Palo Alto devices.
• Another huge plus is the simplicity of managing and ease of scalability.
• Its cost is competitive with similar/like products available.

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• The only real issue we've ran across was a PAT routing issue that wouldn't allow us to connect to a state agency. I would talk to a Cisco rep in case you have any specialized VPN connects. It's not an issue as 99.9% of folks wouldn't run into this as it was very specialized situation.
• Cisco certified users may dislike not having command line and granular control like other Cisco Firewalls. It's designed for easy of use and modern interface.
• Internet connection. The dashboard you access through the internet even if you're on the same network. There is a local interface but it for the initial setup not for managing the box. It hasn't been an issue for us but if your internet connection is of poor quality it might be frustration to manage.
• Yearly costs. We paid several years in advance for the security license. Some may not like having a yearly fee but think of it as a maintenance plan. It is well worth the money.
• Can't drill down like you can with an ASA product with FirePOWER/FireSIGHT as the primary focus of the Meraki is easy of use.
• Cisco's Content Filtering is decent but sometimes blocks legitimate sites that you have to white list.

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• Would be helpful if they supported more file types.
• Would be helpful if they supported uploads of larger files.

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• Cost of purchase and maintenance is high. And it significantly increased, as expected, shortly after Cisco's acquisition of the company.
• This is offset by the ease of use which has a positive ROI effect since staff spends less time configuring and monitoring the firewalls.
• There is not, to my knowledge, a loyalty or hardware replacement program to encourage customers to stay with Meraki when hardware obsolescence requires fork-lifting new equipment.

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• Although expensive to implement correctly, seeing ROI for us is projected within 6 years. The added high end security appliances shows robust attention to confidential data we process.
• This makes us more desirable to clients and helps with when reporting third party combat infiltration testing.
• It's a hard pill to swallow the first year, however new jobs are quicker to be generated due to again the high security measures we implement.

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