Cisco Meraki Z3 Teleworker (discontinued) vs. SonicWall VPN Clients

The Cisco Meraki Z3 Teleworker appliance was ideal for scenarios where the remote worker spent the majority of their time remote. It alleviates the need for VPN software and gives the IT staff additional visibility into the connectivity of the user. We often encountered scenarios where the users broadband was having issues vs the Meraki network and the tools Meraki provides help to work through these scenarios. The case for the Meraki devices is not as strong for occasional users who cannot justify the cost of the appliance vs just logging in via VPN.

Incentivized

It is well suited in places or scenarios where a VPN client is needed to be used either by IT staff or other employees. SonicWall's VPN Clients are very similar to VPN clients of other companies. SonicWall VPN Clients are meant to be used with SonicWall firewalls.

Incentivized

• Easy setup for remote worker
• Versatility with WiFi and cable connections
• Safe to outages with dual wan setup

Incentivized

• Exceptional security
• Relatively easy configuration

Incentivized

• When Internet is lost and come back we need to reset the Z3 device from the dashboard in order to register the IP Phone to CUCM
• It would be nice to manage the Z3 device to a local web portal just for TS
• Max Speed 100Mbps. It would be nice if it could run up to 1GB

Incentivized

• doesn't have ability to name specific IPs, which gets burdensome when you have 50+ sites you access

Incentivized

Does not have a renewal that we pay for by itself. It comes with our firewalls, which we are going to renew.

Incentivized

SonicWall VPN Clients work for the most part. The Global VPN client has had its issues over the years. Also, NetExtender VPN client has had its share of issues. It is nice that SonicWall VPN Clients has updated the GUI of the NetExtender client within the last year, which has made it easier for our users to use.

Incentivized

Phone support has been very reliable and useful, but there have been times when better support documentation would have made that call unnecessary. I like to tackle problems internally if I can, as it tends to save time and usually money. The SonicWall VPN Clients system seems to be pretty locked down as far as being accessible to self-manage.

Incentivized

At the time of implementation, we were not aware of a comparable product from Cisco or comparative vendor. We had initially deployed the Z1 appliance and had so much success that the transition to the Cisco Meraki Z3 Teleworker was a quick and easy fit for us. The device is easy to deploy and just works.

Incentivized

We started the process of vetting Norton VPN, but since it wasn't available from our preferred vendor, we ended up going with SonicWall VPN Clients by default.

Incentivized

The product is very scalable due to its implementation to the Meraki cloud and SD-WAN capabilities.

Incentivized

• Good visibility for IT team so we can monitor and validate the teleworker traffic
• Zero Touch Provisioning so we do not need to send a Engineer to configure it.
• Consumer-grade network security

Incentivized

• Allows for remote work to boost employee productivity
• Allows for IT to access large volumes of sites from a central location. We have about 50 buildings that I VPN into every so often for troubleshooting.

Incentivized