Cisco Meraki SD-WAN vs. Forcepoint Secure SD-WAN

I know just for all our remote offices where we have no onsite IT staff, it just makes it very easy to manage those remote sites, at least from a networking perspective. Where it may be less appropriate—I’m not sure. I really don’t have enough experience with it to know where it wouldn’t be good, but I’ve liked it so far.

• 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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

We implemented Meraki in most of our organization sites, so we are always looking for ways of improving its usage, add more features and discover characteristics that we do not know we already have. As it is an easy to use tool and we are growing, hiring new employees, it is really simple to onboard the new joiners.

Incentivized

Its usable very well

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We have used Silver Peak in the past but it was incredibly expensive and cumbersome to deploy. It required travel to the remote site by IT staff and was built on a platform that wasn't friendly to remote access. The cost of Meraki SD-WAN was easily a tenth of the cost of deploying Silver Peak. In addition to all these other negatived, their was a forced hardware obsolescence necessitating we re-purchase hardware every 3 years

Incentivized

With the implementation of Cisco Meraki SD-WAN on our new site, this has enabled us to optimize the bandwidth of our 3 links. Thanks to this, updates pushed by Microsoft Intune, such as Microsoft CRM operations, are running smoothly. The same applies to SAP and our Teams meetings. And I almost forgot our Cisco telephone system.

Incentivized

• The product, as I said, the hardware, Cisco Meraki SD-WAN hardware has always been great. And the same thing with the Meraki line of hardware products as well. The wireless access points are great. They’re very stable, they can support any number of users depending on how we’ve selected the hardware. Firewalls are very scalable. They are super secure and have helped us configure office security or firewall security remotely from anywhere in the world. So it has definitely helped us manage the product remotely. At the same time, we’ve been able to support small or large branch offices regardless, using the Meraki product.