Item: Cisco Meraki MX
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cisco Meraki helped us in different ways, It helped us in optimizing WAN architecture, as well as LAN Wireless architecture with Meraki MR. With Cisco Meraki, we have a central dashboard (Meraki Cloud Portal) with that we have an option to control the policies and routing centrally. Cisco Meraki MX product has a very easier implementation process, even with very less Network engineering experience Meraki devices can be managed, thanks to the Meraki cloud.

Pros and Cons

Centralized Control of Meraki devices from one cloud portal.
Easier to implement SDWAN policies.
Easier to define centralized firewall rules, which maintain the integrity between different site locations.

More granular parameters can be included while selecting the WAN path for different kinds of traffic.
Support team availability on a short call, should not be a longer wait time on support cases.
Easier implementation of Complicated firewall rules is the area where Meraki can work.

Key Insights

Do you think Cisco Meraki MX delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cisco Meraki MX's feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco Meraki MX live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cisco Meraki MX go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco Meraki MX again?

Yes

Return on Investment

Meraki MX makes it easier to control firewall policies, which make a positive impact on the overall org and makes Security teams happy.
Meraki MX makes it easier to control the enterprise WAN which makes the network more reliable and also gives a lot of confidence in case of failure of one ISP link.
Faster implementation helped creating the positive impact.

Simplified Management

For sure Cisco Meraki MX is easier compared to any other vendor, I understood the product within very less time, as they have a very easier UI. Easier Implementation also makes it faster to implement, so overall this really helped us secure and maintain WAN in a better way compared with our traditional solution.

Integrations with other Cisco products

Cisco Meraki MR, Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series and Cisco Routers

Overall we made a positive impact after the integration of all these products.

Scalability

Because Meraki MX helped us control the traffic with better QoS and traffic shaping for a particular application that the department uses. With this feature, Meraki can give preference to one traffic over another. So more business-sensitive traffic will always have bandwidth availability even if we have congestion. This really is a 5-star feature.

Alternatives Considered

Palo Alto Networks Prisma SD-WAN (CloudGenix), Cisco SD-WAN and Juniper Contrail Networking

Other Software Used

Open Systems SASE+, ServiceNow IT Operations Management, BMC Helix ITSM (Remedy)

Likelihood to Recommend

Cisco Meraki is well suited for the medium-size enterprise environment, however when we have high traffic generating branch Meraki might not be well suited, we have to integrate other solutions. Cisco Meraki MX is well suited when centralized control is required, and we don't want to end up troubleshooting and configuring individual devices, instead, we can do it all from the portal. Defining the centralized WAN rules, and applying that template to different Meraki MX branches for path selection, also make it a great choice for the enterprise to have multiple sites. As again individual branch config again is the pain.

Meraki MX is really great combination of different Networking Solutions.

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Meraki MX