Meraki Excels at Easy Scaling

We leverage Meraki MX as our primary security appliance for our U-Haul operated retail locations, repair shops and manufacturing plants — over 2500 locations in total, and as our Auto-VPN concentrator hubs. I was involved with the initial testing and rollout of these devices, am the Engineering SME for Meraki within U-Haul, and manage/train our operations and support teams that handle move, add, change actions every day. The primary business problem that Meraki solved for us was providing a lower barrier to entry for our technicians and role based access control through the cloud management dashboard. Previously, we used Cisco ASA-5506, and the amount of know-how required to make changes and monitor these devices was much higher — limiting the amount of skilled workers. Our NOC is now augmented by hundreds of field technicians who can also leverage the tools of the Meraki platform. A secondary benefit to the MX67-C in particular is the built in cellular modem providing failover or even standalone WAN connections for locations waiting for dedicated broadband connections. All in all, Meraki MX has allowed our organization to scale our networks FAR more nimbly.

Meraki's ease of use has improved every aspect of our network support process. We now have self-serve options for our field technicians. What would have taken months and Cisco training to help new hires understand is now done in weeks. The amount of time to stand up a new MX is also a fraction of the ASA platform we’ve replaced it with.