Likelihood to Recommend It is a flexible tool for managing and optimizing WAN connections, but it does require some technical expertise to manage. It excels in its ability to integrate multiple WANs. It will however be a not-so-useful purchase if your company has few locations as it will be more expensive and complex for nothing.
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 Enhancing network security by integrating with other security solutions and providing secure segmentation of the network. Improving network visibility and control by providing detailed analytics and network-wide policy management. Simplifying branch office networking by reducing the need for specialized hardware and simplifying network management. 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 It does appear to be a little glitchy when you go from template mode to CLI mode and try to do testing on certain areas. The configuration tends to get hung in that old session when you drop it from being controlled by the controller to making changes in CLI. I've had a lot of instances where you try to put it back into controller mode for review management and it holds on to your items you've had in CLI mode , it gets a little confused at which config it needs to use. You end up having to reset the whole number environment. 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 Likelihood to Renew highly recommended
Read full review Usability It is the best solution on the market.
Read full review Support Rating Al ser soluciones integradas del portafolio de soluciones de Cisco, el soporte es transversal a cada uno de los componentes implementados, teniendo el cliente la capacidad de resolver sus inconvenientes bajo una misma infraestructura que está totalmente homologada, satisfacciendo de esta manera, las necesidades del cliente asi como permitiendo, que este se concentre en su negocio. Since the Cisco SD-WAN tools are a part of Cisco’s broader portfolio of solutions, support cross-cuts to each of our deployed components, with our company as the customer having the ability to solve our problems through the same, approved infrastructure. Their support team easily satisfies the customer’s needs so that they continue to focus on business functions.
Read full review 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 The proof-of-concept setup that was done at a client site did provided a greater positive impression by Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN than Fortinet Secure SD-WAN for sure. It makes sense to use Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN while the major client is a Cisco house where more than 95% of network equipment used at their global networks are Cisco's.
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 It's definitely decreased the amount that we spend on really expensive circuits every year. We're moving to cheaper broadband circuits with much higher throughput, being able to leverage those and still get the performance that we want, the quality of service that we want. 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