Less onsite intervention
Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Meraki SD-WAN
Easy to deploy, Zero Touch Provisioning for real, Easy to manage, great visibility. I am a network architect and I can see the pre and post sales of the solutions, I can see the benefit in use cases like Retail and multi branch/site reality. It can reduce the cost of expensive connectivity like MPLS, in many cases an MPLS line is not needed considering the huge improvements that the internet connections reached.
Pros
- Easy to Deploy
- Zero Touch Provisioning for real
- Easy to manage
- great visibility
Cons
- On the logs visibility, for example to understand which security policies are matched
- playing around with the nat on overlay tunnels
- Cisco SASE solution is not very well integrated
- Less onsite intervention or reduced at minimum so less transfer costs. I would estimate at 40% due to the dashboard visibility.
- Generally speaking less hands on hence less costs due to the professional services, in my opinion reduced than 30% to 40% It depends on the scenario.
- Less licenses costs compared with other competitors due the inclusion of the minimum features on SD-WAN functionalities
Since the dashboard provide the most important information, the network engineers can avoid to transfer on site in case of troubleshooting or new deployment, indeed in one case It's needed only in case of severe issues, in the second we can just rely on a first level engineer or field engineer and manage the installation centrally thanks to the zero touch provisioning effectiveness
It was possible to onboard more than just Meraki on the Cloud Dashboard, with the addition of the last Cisco Catalyst devices, enriching the portfolio and incriesing the available scenarios. The sensors have created new opportunities to bond with customers by enabling some physical security features and the MG increased the resilience on site connectivity all controlled by a single pane of glass.
They fit different scenarios, while Meraki is really easy to use and to deploy It lacks some feature that in some scenarios you really require specific features like nat combined with vpn or fine tuning with BGP or third party site to site integrations.That increases the difficult to mantain and deploy, anyway sometimes you can't avoid and Meraki in such cases It's not the best.
Do you think Cisco Meraki SD-WAN delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Cisco Meraki SD-WAN's feature set?
Yes
Did Cisco Meraki SD-WAN live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Cisco Meraki SD-WAN go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Cisco Meraki SD-WAN again?
Yes
Using Cisco Meraki SD-WAN
100 - All the levels rely on the SD-WAN connectivity because of the reachability to the Datacenter services, Active Directory, ERP, CRM etc. so starting from the basic employees to the management. It is a matter of enable a stable and resilience connectivity to grant business critical services always up and running.
2 - This is the average IT stuff dedicated to the network part of the IT services. The single glass of pane, the simplicity in the usability of the platform, the possibility to create automation grant the business to reduce the operative costs of the stuff without compromising the quality of the service.
- Enable the reachability of Datacenter services with less single point of failure.
- Reduce the cost with expensive connectivities, switching from mpls to internet connectivity.
- It become possible to rely on different providers per branch connectivity increasing the resilience.
- Relying with the API integration we could configure several branches in a row
- Grant stability of the ISP connectivity by enabling recurrent speed test through the new API + Insight and check If the bandwidth available is over a certain threshold and ingesting our monitoring platform to represent the behavior during the time.
- relying on the incoming AI assistant to manage, troubleshoot and deploy configurations
- connecting the branches to the new SASE solution Secure Access
Evaluating Cisco Meraki SD-WAN and Competitors
Yes - Old legacy solutions like Watchguard and Sophos. They have been replaced because they couldn't provide the wide ecosystem and single dashboard to control all the device type forming the network infrastructure. The simplicity of the setup and maintenance. They also were in end of sales, the business continuity was at risk in case of outages or new vulnerabilities
- Cloud Solutions
- Scalability
- Ease of Use
The most important part was the management through the cloud solution, It reduced the resource consumption on the on prem infrastructure and in a migration to a full cloud customer It 100% satisfy the requirement. This also reduced the effort to maintain the network infrastructure because there's no more need to upgrade It.
I would evaluate a maximum of three vendors, with a process of presentation of the solution, a demo and the two vendors who was capable to create confidence, we would ask them to arrange a PoC with the cost of the solution. The result of the PoC balanced with the settle of the possible budget It would have influenced the final decision
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