Cisco Meraki MX Review
Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Meraki MX
So we use this product in all kinds of different verticals, whether it be healthcare, manufacturing, small business, you know, all over the different verticals. The reason that we lead with this product is because of its ease of use. It's a very easy product to configure, a very easy product to get out there to the customer. We could do a zero-touch deployment with Smart Hands. Overall very, very friendly use cases for these devices.
- I would say that my favorite feature of this product is the Auto VPN. If you're doing a multi-site Meraki deployment, it's just a matter of clicking a couple of buttons and you're done as to getting inside a CLI and doing a very more complex VPN construction.
- I would like to see Meraki implement a more robust logging feature for the firewall side of this. That's one thing that's lacking between an MX and a traditional ASA.
- ASA gives you a more in-depth and granular view of logging, whereas compared to the MX it only gives you very minor details and glimpses at things.
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
- So we feel that in general, as far as my company goes, the return on investment for these things is very great. There's always the new cycle of customers needing renewals on their subscriptions. Once we get these into customer sites, we usually see that they're very happy with the product and want to continue with it throughout its lifecycle. So when something reaches end of life, it's very easy for us to go in with the next model that's recommended from Cisco Meraki. And it definitely makes sense.
So ease of deployment. Again this is a very great thing where I can sit back at the head end, develop and create a new organization, create a new network, pre-configure this device, and just have Smart Hands, say in another state plug this in for me. And it's up and it's working. It's very simplified that way. And then, when I do transition this over to our NOC services junior analysts and junior engineers, they're able to correct and diagnose problems very easily just based off of the dashboard view. And they're not getting lost in the CLI.
It allows for a better profit when deploying these out to customer sites. We basically have a template when we're doing a scope of work and setting up a project for a customer where if we're setting out an MX device, here's how much it's gonna cost, here's the time. And typically, if we're done sooner than that, it's a bigger margin, but at the same time, it just makes things so much easier.
So, other products that I've used in the firewall world that are kind of equal to this is traditional Cisco ASA, I've used SonicWall firewalls and Sophos firewalls as well. As far as how they stack up each really has its place a lot of the time when it comes to customer choice. A lot of it depends on the dollar side, and though we try to steer them towards Meraki as a first step. Sometimes if they want to go with that Sonic Wall, because it is less expensive though they are sacrificing a lot when they do go that route. But that's on the customer's pocketbook I suppose.