Cisco Meraki Firewall review – no more all nighters !
March 01, 2019
Cisco Meraki Firewall review – no more all nighters !
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Meraki MX Firewalls
We use Cisco Meraki MX devices in over 500 location across the Western United States, Hawaii, Alaska and Micronesia’s to perform corporate VPN tunnels to sensitive data, maintain PCI Compliance, provide content filtering and intrusion detection.
- Static and Dynamic WAN IP assignment is simple to use and set up
- 4G Failover is crictical on our retail outlet and allows for maximum uptime
- High Availibility for our Data Centers and key locations
- Easy to manage and configure even from a smart phone or tablet in the field
- One pane of glass for our entire WAN and Security
- Muiltcast over WAN - This is a key technology for notification and paging that Meraki has promised for 4 years but has not delivered.
- Manage discrete aspects like built in wireless or firewall rules by policy rather than my template.
- Capacity to group large numbers of networks in regions or segments. Hard to search thru 500 networks when they are all in a single drop down list.
- Easier to manage and budget IT assests and services. No more smartnet renewals! Hurray!
- Lower cost to deploy due fewer high level network engineers needed.
The choice to switch from traditional Cisco 800,1800, 1900,2900,3800 and ISR firewalls was driven out of the need to reduce the cost of professional services and advance a large network team to manage and train. There was a lot of resistance on the network team’s part on moving away from the CLI for traditional firewall and VPN applications but once they saw the ease and flexibility of the Meraki Dashboard and tools available as well as the ability to roll out changes that took weeks in days they became advocates.