Great for many small offices
November 08, 2017

Great for many small offices

Guillaume Le Saint | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Meraki MX Firewalls

Our business grew to 30 locations in 10 countries over the past five years, all these offices access corporate applications and cloud services. Remote office deployment and administration was becoming complex and costly with our Juniper SSG based firewall infrastructure. We moved all 30 locations to Meraki MX/Z1 devices, and kept Juniper firewall for our data-center.
  • Deployment for small offices is very easy. Ship a Z1, clone your template configuration, adjust a few settings and you're ready to go.
  • Cost is very competitive, at least with APAC pricing. You can't beat the price point of Z1 for home offices.
  • Monitoring and reporting features are very good. Out of the box you get basic, but comprehensive reports on bandwidth, sessions, traffic. Application identification is ok, not great but sufficient for basic use cases (mail, browsing, cloud applications, citrix, smb...).
  • MX seem to be designed for active/passive up-link scenarios. Routing/load balancing features are very basic.
  • Sales channels are weak, it doesn't feel integrated with the rest of Cisco yet, and you'll struggle to get trainings, product roadmaps or feature requests processes.
  • Technical support team are qualified, but not responsive. Our teams frequently waits until the next-day for a response on their tickets.
  • Reduced time to open an office from weeks to days.
  • Reduced small offices administration and monitoring costs.
  • Improved small offices network uptime with active/passive and 3G failover features.
We compared Meraki, Fortigate, Sophos, Barracuda. We selected Meraki based on:
- Pricing is simple. Two license types, appliance + subscription.
- Pricing is competitive. For the appliance + subscription, you pay what you'd pay for a competitor appliance and get the centralized management for free.
- Deployment is fast.
- Z1 is the best small office "do it all" appliance we've PoC'd.
Use Meraki MX if you have a large number of small offices where the MX/Z1 can be your "do it all" L3+ appliance. Use larger models as VPN concentrators. Do not use Meraki MX larger models as data-center firewalls, you'll be asking for trouble.