Great scalability

Cisco Meraki MX has been deployed at 900 shops and 14 warehouses. It resolved infrastructure standardization and scalability, and it contained security issues. Templates have been used extensively, so we completed the migration in under 2 months. Cisco Meraki MX was great, however not that happy with the MS line and their compatibility with the datacenter stuff.

As it says, easy to manage.

We have completed the implementation. The biggest challenge was with endpoint inventory, endpoint security, physical network standardisation and generating the fewest possible network templates. Other big challenge was two-factor authentication for remote access, and creating a separate set of numbered usernames for admin access.

People adapted quite easily to remote work, out of necessity, but having people back to the office, at least for a couple of days per week seems to be the real challenge. This is important for training and integrating the junior staff, and also for integrating the different parts of the organization that now are used to work independently.

The Cisco's hybrid work solutions solved the remote work challenges, but it's not the technology that can fix the people's desire to go back to the office.

People spend the same amount of time doing their work in a hybrid model, and do their work well. However, the border between home and work has melted, and it's hard to get the same quality of human interaction as it used to be before. This is especially important when providing context and training to junior staff. Senior staff is probably doing better with hybrid work or fully remote work.

Cisco's products integrate well, and that's the main reason for using them. There were, however, some blind spots, for example a cloud proxy, and the automation for deploying secure endpoints (workstations). We will also consider replacing Webex with Teams, for the same reason of better integration.