Although working from home is cited as being easier and less stressful for many employees, has anyone stopped to ask IT professionals how they feel about this? Probably not.

Remote work = greater complexity and security risks

The hype around remote work often ends at the doorstep of the IT department. When it comes to the management of a remote workforce, what was once solved by a simple VPN has grown into an intricate combination of managing permissions, ensuring secure access, fighting for visibility into remote networks, and scaling to meet the changing demands of the business. These challenges can be attributed to the growing reliance on hybrid cloud workloads, which comes in parallel with the rise of large-scale remote work.

For organizations embracing a work-from-home (WFH) policy, this often creates a headache for the teams in charge of delivering the simple and secure experiences that businesses and their employees expect. Security is key for an effective hybrid work strategy, but when remote employees access corporate networks through low-grade routers operated and owned by residential service providers, a proper security posture becomes difficult to maintain in the long run.

One platform for everything 

Cisco Meraki is positioned to solve the issue of managing a remote workforce and has been doing so for the better half of the past decade. The Z Series cloud-managed teleworker gateway enables IT teams to connect, secure, and troubleshoot remote workers from the same platform as branch, campus, and IoT.

The newest line of cloud-managed teleworker gateways in the Z4 family provides a secure enterprise-grade router with a built-in firewall that is centrally managed and observed from the Meraki dashboard. When combined with the new Secure Teleworker license, customers benefit from deeper visibility and tighter security thanks to advanced content filtering, health metrics, and integrations into Cisco Talos and Cisco AMP. The ability to provide cellular connectivity to remote employees with the Z4C ensures that your business-critical staff such as IT admin, security teams, and support personnel stay online and connected to the network in the event of internet outages.

Secure remote work that is here to stay

The Meraki Z4 provides unique benefits that satisfy each stakeholder in your business’ remote work strategy.

• IT teams enjoy zero-touch provisioning for thousands of remote employees with robust monitoring features and blanketed enterprise-grade security that effectively turns each home office into a mini-branch.
• Remote workers benefit from a sleek, quiet desktop gateway that boosts their overall WFH experience through improved application quality.
• The business benefits from a reliable, long-term remote work strategy that widens their hiring pool, retains top talent, and mitigates a growing security risk.

Built on the Meraki platform, businesses can easily scale through our intuitive product offerings that cover everything from SD-WAN, IoT, switching, and more. IT teams can add even more value by leveraging integrations with both Cisco and third-party applications. All of this can be managed simply from a single Meraki dashboard.

By combining Meraki cloud-managed teleworker gateways with the power of the Meraki platform, businesses can ensure that their remote or hybrid workforce stays secure when accessing applications, regardless of where the user or workload resides.

For more information on how the Meraki Z4 can transform your remote work experience, explore our page or contact our sales team. 

The post Creating a Long-Term Strategy for Secure Remote Work appeared first on The Meraki Blog.

This means that while your team has access to more technologies and tools than ever before, there are also new challenges to creating great experiences across your network.

New capabilities with a hybrid infrastructure

A distributed and hybrid technology infrastructure offers capabilities previously unavailable to businesses. Many IT teams have adopted this model, and as such, the hybridized array of applications and tools they support are being used to capacity, demanding more bandwidth than ever.

This means you’re likely accountable for more touchpoints and have more areas of your network to analyze when issues arise, which inevitably makes it harder to identify and resolve issues, risking downtime when the associated business costs are higher than ever.

Gain visibility of SaaS applications outside your network

To help you provide consistent, always-on experiences, Cisco Meraki is pleased to announce the general availability of support for ThousandEyes on Meraki networks. Natively integrated into Meraki MX security and SD-WAN appliances, ThousandEyes on the Meraki platform enables proactive monitoring of your SaaS applications across the internet and application servers—domains traditionally outside of your IT team’s control.

This reduces the time to identify the root cause of issues and provides detailed insights to prevent negative digital experience of your users.

Meraki offers the only secure SD-WAN solution that fully integrates ThousandEyes agents into its WAN appliances, so that you can configure and run tests efficiently and at scale from the same dashboard you use to manage your networks end-to-end.

Get ahead of problems before you’re aware of them

When you’re getting started, you’ll identify an array of core applications and networks that you want to pay close attention to. With this offering, you can quickly activate ThousandEyes agents at scale across your network to continuously monitor SaaS application performance.

Combined with an integrative platform approach to secure SD-WAN (and more), the Meraki platform helps you automatically identify and resolve issues, often before users or administrators are even aware there’s a problem. With ThousandEyes Network Intelligence on the Meraki platform, you can rapidly flag and communicate any performance issues occurring across the enterprise.

Deliver the ‘wow’ factor

Creating technology experiences that wows users, customers, and IT professionals alike is not only possible, but simplified, thanks to this new integration with ThousandEyes. Business customers using Meraki on the Advanced Security and Secure SD-WAN Plus licenses can take advantage of the ThousandEyes integration today by activating it on the Meraki dashboard. Those on the Enterprise license can try the complete Secure SD-WAN Plus experience with ThousandEyes here. You can also call your Meraki rep to learn more.

The post Create Experiences With More SaaS appeared first on The Meraki Blog.

One of the names synonymous with the art of puzzle-making is Ravensburger. Founded in Germany in 1883, Ravensburger is a leader in puzzles, board games, activities, and toys—they even have their own adventure park! 

We sat down with Markus Moses from Ravensburger to discuss their partnership with Cisco Meraki and how our solution has helped him and his very small IT team scale operations while supporting and growing the expansion of the company as a whole.  

Could you tell us a bit about your role and your company? 

Marcus: Of course! Hello, I’m Markus Moses and I’ve worked for Ravensburger since 1994, so quite a long time. My current role is Senior Network Analyst and I’m responsible for the network at Ravensburger and its subsidiaries.  

Ravensburger is a publisher that produces puzzles, board games, and books. We also have an adventure park for children. We have about 2,000 employees and are continuing to grow internationally with locations in Europe and America.  

Wow, very cool! I’m sure you have so many great stories from your 20+ years with the company. We’d love to hear a bit more about the IT infrastructure you built over that time. 

Marcus: Yes, it’s been a long time. Lots of change and growth. We have about 55 networks spanning across Europe and the U.S. We have a mix of Cisco Catalyst switches and Cisco wireless access points that we manage through the Meraki dashboard. We also use some Meraki IoT products like Meraki MV smart cameras and MT sensors.  

Could you tell us more about how you use Cisco Catalyst switches with the Meraki dashboard? 

Marcus: Yes. Meraki is very user-friendly and I’m happy with how the Cisco Catalyst devices and the Meraki dashboard work together.  

We can add our Catalyst switches to the Meraki dashboard, which has vastly improved our visibility and troubleshooting. Having all the devices on one dashboard has been a huge win for us.  

That’s so great to hear. What was life like before Meraki?  

Marcus: It was a headache, many sleepless nights. Meraki has helped vastly by combining everything on one dashboard, which helps alleviate my workload and streamline operations.  

Device management was disconnected before, but now I have one dashboard for everything. It’s a dream.  

Let’s take a step back, why did you decide to partner with Meraki? 

Marcus: The main intention of partnering with Meraki was to alleviate our IT challenges. We are a very small team on the network side—it’s just myself and a part-time employee—so the lack of central device management was really cumbersome and was eating up a lot of time.  

We chose Meraki because it covered all of our needs—from switching to sensors. 

What have been some of the most notable results of the partnership? 

Marcus: The dashboard makes updates easier and allows them to happen quicker. I can automate updates, which saves me time, and now I have a lot more visibility into device health and troubleshooting. I was able to reduce the amount of hours I previously spent  troubleshooting because of the dashboard.  

I also save time by not having to travel to each location. Whether it’s to the park, the office, or the shops, I can manage everything on the dashboard from anywhere. For example, I can send deployment packets to each location right from the dashboard, and even though each location has different needs, we can deploy the solutions without needing to travel, which is huge.  

Even though the number of devices are growing and the network is growing, the amount of work I have hasn’t increased and I don’t need to hire anyone else. That’s a big win for us as a small team supporting such a big company.  

How would you describe your partnership with Meraki? 

Easy! It’s so easy to use! Easy to scale, simple to use. I’m very happy.  

Curious to learn more?  

Visit the Ravensburger website to learn about all the amazing board games, activities, and, of course, puzzles they have for sale. 

Also, check out our other Meraki customer success stories to discover more ways to get the most from your network. 

The post Solving the Device Management Puzzle appeared first on The Meraki Blog.

Here are key insights from the survey that will help you better compete and grow no matter your industry or the size of your IT team. 

Your digital transformation journey should lead to better experiences 

There are three milestones to successful digital transformation, as a recent survey from TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group highlights: becoming more operationally efficient, developing new data-centric products and services, and delivering better and more differentiated experiences for customers. 

A cloud-managed platform places customer and employee experience where it belongs—as a critical strategy to drive business growth. While boosting efficiency and innovation are key motivators for digitalization, it’s people and their experiences that are the underlying drivers of success. A cloud-based network enhances customer and employee experiences, creating visibility and connectedness across every step of their journey. 

“Cloud-enabled strategies to accelerate digital transformation and support hybrid work are differentiators that set businesses apart and enable a unified customer experience. Treating these concepts as key business goals integral to long-term growth is how I see executives leading their organizations to success.”  

Lawrence Huang, SVP/GM, Cisco Networking Experiences – Meraki & Wireless  

Many challenges, one cross-industry solution 

Embarking on a successful digital transformation journey can seem daunting. Business and IT leaders across industries face many of the same challenges that inhibit transformation, and the ability to overcome and solve for those challenges is often  guiding factor when deciding how to modernize business systems. Tech leaders face friction as they try to navigate IT complexity, meet security and compliance demands, and gain visibility into useful data. While these hurdles vary in height by industry, there is one unifying solution across industries: a cloud-first strategy. 

No matter your industry, breaking away from an outdated IT infrastructure can free your company from legacy systems and technical debt. A cloud strategy opens up new areas of opportunity by providing access to innovative new technologies and services that keep your company agile and resilient.  

Drive greater operational efficiencies for improved agility and resilience 

CEOs and tech leaders are choosing digitalization to prepare their organizations for economic unknowns and security threats. A thoughtful digital transformation strategy addresses the needs of security and compliance, infrastructure and operations, and workplace flexibility by offering resilience and a foundation for growth.  

Cloud-enabled technology like AI-powered network optimization and predictive analytics saves time and drives cost savings, operational efficiency, and productivity. A single unified cloud solution can simplify and modernize in the present while future-proofing for continued growth. 

“Organizations must be able to move quickly to seize opportunities ahead of the competition. Cloud services have an important role to play in making the business they serve more agile and, therefore, more likely to succeed.” 

Gartner, 6 Steps for Planning a Cloud Strategy 

Industry-specific use cases, like at-home patient monitoring in healthcare or seamless delivery services from digital storefronts in retail, are all made possible thanks to cloud-first digital solutions that empower organizations to automate and scale. 

Across industries, organizations can increase the productivity of workers with elevated capabilities that deliver enhanced experiences to employees and customers faster. Read the whitepaper for a more in-depth exploration of the benefits of a cloud platform.  

Make cloud-enabled advantages your differentiator 

A cloud strategy prepares your business for future risk and empowers your organization to move with agility and maintain a competitive edge. In a recent interview with Forbes’ Editor-At-Large and Global Futurist, Rich Karlgaard, Lawrence Huang, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco Meraki Wireless discussed how cloud-activated resilience is a business differentiator. Implementing a centralized architecture where you can deploy security policies end-to-end, have data insights and visibility site-wide, and adapt to your customers’ needs with speed and efficiency provides a springboard for you to further define your own unique business differentiator.  

Infuse innovation with transformational change 

Transformational change at a company begins with decision-making during planning. Innovative CIOs, or to quote Karlgaard, a “CIO+,” will choose to infuse innovation into their IT strategy at the forefront, weighing important revenue drivers like employee and customer experience in their digital transformation needs. By selecting a cloud-managed platform from which to transform your IT infrastructure, you are prioritizing enhanced experiences and enabling operations that scale at the speed of your business.  

Read the ESG whitepaper, “Leveraging the Cloud to Gain the Benefits of Digital Transformation” for a more in-depth exploration into some of the benefits gained by applying a cloud-first strategy as part of your digital transformation journey. Visit the Meraki cloud-managed platform page to learn how we can help you get there. 

The post Your Competitive Edge Is a Cloud Strategy appeared first on The Meraki Blog.

Government technology leaders are helping to address staffing shortages and improve employee and constituent experiences, while also driving organizational and IT benefits and increasing their agencies’ agility.

After all, many public service agencies cannot compete with the private sector’s deeper pockets. For some, perks like stock options and international business travel can be more alluring than serving the community.

For others, the allure of rewarding work in an environment that provides plenty of time for engaging projects and tasks is worth more than a huge salary or a triple-barrel title. Frequently, they enjoy the opportunity to work in and for their community, job stability and the pension plans that these careers afford.

Setting up for success

Although career paths are varied and can meander, the route to delivering these benefits is clear. A comprehensive cloud-first platform—combined with a dashboard that provides visibility across your networks delivers the power to easily integrate, modify and update technologies. By advancing your organization’s use of scale and automation, you can simplify network operations and improve employee and constituent experiences.

This is crucial, analysts say.

“With so many people switching to jobs that better accommodate their needs holistically, employers needed to invest in automation—automating workflows to facilitate remote onboarding and task and process automation enables workers new to their jobs to have the ability to focus on outcomes over process,” Amy Loomis, Research Vice President of Future of Work at IDC, told CIODive.com.

There are other benefits as well.

Pleasing people

Recruiting and retaining employees is a top concern for most government managers, regardless of department. Automation delivers big productivity gains. In one report, 75% of technology leaders reported time savings of four hours per person per 40-hour week. By eliminating these once-manual, often error-prone tasks, IT professionals can spend more time on projects that drive the results that residents or visitors experience—results employees can be proud of.

Pay rates for IT professionals as a whole are expected to rise at a median rate of 4% in 2023, despite much-publicized layoffs. Plus, the boredom—or worse, “boreout,” which is chronic boredom that can come from repetitive or seemingly meaningless work, may lead to absenteeism, health problems or quitting.

Discovering opportunities

Your team members can, perhaps, spend some of this time on training or further automating and customizing their networks. Open-source APIs empower developers to quickly and simply manage tedious tasks like adding new organizations, networks or devices or build a dashboard for field technicians or use cases for a particular agency or division.

Alternatively, consider partner solutions that add capabilities such as custom splash pages, crowd intelligence or alert management.

Working anywhere

In some roles, delivering on the promise of hybrid work is another important employee criteria. With a platform-based cloud-managed solution, your organization can—at scale—simply and securely deploy systems anywhere, reducing the multiple costs associated with truck rolls. The city of Stad Menen, Belgium, saw more than 50% reduction in on-site travel by IT when addressing networking issues after it deployed a cloud-managed network platform that featured automation at scale.

Even employees who haven’t traditionally had the opportunity to work, at least occasionally from home or the road, are getting more of what Gartner calls “hybrid flexibility.” When the five-person IT team for the city of New Castle County, Delaware, deployed new wireless, switching and security across more than 25 sites, there were multiple benefits, including faster speeds, more reliability, reduced help-desk calls and enhanced protection.

Government workers can access the network from the parking lot, which makes them more efficient and improves both response times and public safety. Police officers often upload evidence and body-camera footage from their vehicles via a secure portal and government administrators can access data instantly in case of an event.

Improving experiences

You can help your organization defray utilities costs and enhance employee experiences with smart cameras and environmental sensors.

Cloud-managed sensors automatically adjust room temperatures to comfortable levels, avoiding blasts of unnecessary, environmentally unfriendly and costly air conditioning or heat. They also help ensure areas are kept sanitary by maintaining the cleanliness that employees and constituents expect and they can monitor air quality to avoid common contaminants.

Happier constituents

When IT rolls out new applications faster and when updates don’t crash systems or take hours to deploy, end users are happier. They’re not calling the help desk or contacting support via email or chat-bot. That’s a good day for technology professionals, whether or not their role officially involves support.

Brooklyn Public Library offers a wide array of services because their IT team is no longer tied up with manual processes across the library’s 59 individual sites, said Selvon Smith, Vice President, Information Technology and CIO.

“We don’t have enough people on the IT team to be at every branch, so having a remote system allows us to do way more with fewer human resources and without the ability to do that, the branches wouldn’t have these programs or the proper tools to host them,” he added.

Interested in boosting productivity and experience at your agency? Visit Cisco Meraki for Government.

The post How scale and automation can enhance employee and constituent lives—really appeared first on The Meraki Blog.

We recently hosted Aaron Sturniolo, IT Director at RRMM Architects, a Chesapeake Virginia-based firm with four offices and customers across many states, for a conversation about the setup and operation of his IT network for 150 employees using the Cisco Meraki cloud-based network platform.

Aaron shared valuable insights on what it takes to run a secure, distributed office network with a very small IT team. Watch the full webinar to hear practical tips from Aaron and learn how you can optimize your network for remote and hybrid work.

Q: Aaron, can you tell us about RRMM’s hybrid work environment?

A: Our hybrid work journey started when our staff had to work remotely during the pandemic. We needed a solution that was secure, reliable, and user friendly to allow folks to work from home and remain collaborative. With the Meraki MX security appliances already in place in all of our offices for secure VPN connectivity, we supplied MX security devices to all our employees. This allowed us to easily extend security anywhere folks were located.

Over the last year, our setup has allowed us to evolve our hybrid work model, with employees in the office two to three days a week.

Q: What have been the key ways you’ve kept employees productive and motivated?

A. Mainly it’s been the reliability and ease of use of the Meraki platform.

Users have the opportunity to continue working with their MX devices while at home, which provides the ease of just turning on their laptops. It automatically connects to Wi-Fi using the same ID that we use at the office.

We also leverage Meraki Systems Manager mobile device management (MDM) to remotely access their devices to troubleshoot connectivity issues. It also allows the user to come into the office and plop down almost anywhere and either join the Wi-Fi or plug into our data network and use the resources that we have in the office.

All of these benefits keep people happy and help them stay productive, and that’s the biggest thing we’re trying to do.

Q: Can you tell us about how you’ve done IT all on your own?

A: One of the ways I’ve been able to save so much time was through the configuration templates in the Meraki dashboard. When we had to send about 70 MX devices to employees’ homes, we created a perfect configuration and then copied that to all the devices. We just selected the source and the devices we wanted and hit copy. This gave every employee the same content filtering, firewalls, and other static information that we needed to have programmed for them. It’s quick and easy to do through the dashboard.

Some of the benefits that RRMM Architects sees are thanks to Aaron’s IT leadership and the solutions he’s implemented, including:

• Reduced IT headcount costs
• Faster and easier issue resolution
• Increased employee productivity and security
• Reduced hiring costs by finding employees from a broader geography close to key clients

Watch the recorded webinar to hear more useful best practices and try the Meraki dashboard for yourself to see how easy it is to conquer hybrid work.

The post Delivering Hybrid Work With a Team of One appeared first on The Meraki Blog.

Beyond these initial face-to-face meetings with the great people I work with, I finally got to interact with some of the many Meraki customers I frequently speak to via Webex and email. Excitingly, I also shared a big announcement on the second day of the event. 

Cisco Live saw the debut of Cisco Meraki Insiders, a program for the most engaged Meraki customers. This invitation-only program rewards enthusiastic Meraki customers who earn  points for completing challenges. Not only can they trade those points for some pretty sweet Meraki swag, they can also expand their professional networks by meeting other Meraki customers around the world.

For the previous six months I had been getting this program ready to launch, and the day was finally here. 

About a week before I left for Vegas, I figured out a way to wear my passion for Meraki on my sleeve. Literally. I hand-embroidered a one-of-a-kind “Cisco Meraki Insiders” jacket that acted both as an icebreaker and advertisement for the Customer Advocacy Program.

In fact, it even caught the eye of company executives like Todd Nightingale, Executive Vice President and General Manager at Cisco, who had a pretty hectic schedule at the event. (Todd, if you’re reading this, I have more green embroidery thread: let me know what size jacket you wear.)

Sharing the love

As Head of Customer Stories for Meraki, I get to hear about some of the amazing ways businesses, government agencies, and educators use the technology Meraki and our partners develop. I frequently leave these conversations awestruck. 

Most recently I spoke with technology leaders from Clarks, a hugely popular shoe manufacturer and retailer that uses Meraki technology to power its brick-and-mortar retail locations and pop-up shops around the UK. I also spoke with educators at Langley School, a private K-12 educational institution that revolutionized in-person and virtual learning with Meraki Wi-Fi by reaching every inch of its 100-acre campus with wireless connectivity. 

And there are many, many more stories like this. 

Meraki customers are doing incredible things with technologies like the Meraki dashboard that allow them to simplify everything so they can spend more time focused on what matters the most: helping their own customers and community members.  

Saving the world

The final highlight of my first Cisco Live was the opportunity to lead a session on sustainability with customers and partners. They spoke about how Meraki empowers them to live their conservation goals.

As I opened the session on Thursday morning, something magical happened (or rather, #MerakiMagic happened). All 150 or so people at the presentation acknowledged how it would truly take all of us and our companies to come together to advocate for a more sustainable future. 

The mood turned reverent, and I realized that despite it being my first time at Cisco Live, and being new to Meraki, I belong here. I belong with these people who want to use our technology for better, who want to simplify the way they work, and who want to partner with Cisco to create a better future for generations to come. 

I had become an insider. We’d love you to become one, too.

The post An Insider’s Look at Cisco Live appeared first on The Meraki Blog.

Original Challenges:

• The team had a dated CCTV system that was only deployed in a couple of areas around the facility.
• The processing plant spans a large area and contains several tall structures, like silos, making it difficult to survey multiple areas at once.
• A constant stream of lorries (or delivery trucks) driving through the facility introduces potential safety hazards for workers.

The Deployment:

• An initial deployment of 16 MV71 cameras helps cover a majority of external areas.
• Benji and the team relied heavily on the Meraki mobile app when physically installing cameras.

“Literally plug it in, and it’s up and running.”

Results:

• The Operations team, as well as the Health & Safety team, utilize the camera feeds to monitor potential hazards  throughout the site, such as high traffic areas.
• The team already encountered and resolved one incident involving a lorry driving into a barrier with the help of their MV deployment. They were able to prove the cause of the accident and assign liability accordingly.
• Benji and his team have saved both time and money due to the “plug-and-play” nature of the cameras, and the lack of extraneous hardware, like a UPS.
• The architecture of the cameras allows the team to monitor video feeds locally without impacting the company’s bandwidth usage.
• The team is exploring the possibility of expanding their deployment into the factory to help monitor processes and ensure employee safety, both inside and outside the facility.

Learn more about MV by getting in touch with your sales rep or signing up for a free webinar.

The post Crediton Dairy MV Case Study appeared first on The Meraki Blog.

And those routers? Those are but a small fraction of the devices still stacked up against the wall waiting to be configured. Your role? Getting ready to join your colleagues, not for a LAN party, but a Router Party.

IT team member configuring devices in a hotel in San Francisco in 2011.

For Randy Haan, Director of Infrastructure – Western Region at The Salvation Army, Router Parties occurred quite often, happening as early as 2007. In a webinar on March 22nd, at 11 AM PT, Haan was joined by a Cisco Meraki Product Specialist to share more about the need for Router Parties and what they were like, as well as how Meraki helped them transition from in-person configurations to a simple, easy-to-use dashboard.

The Salvation Army, a non-profit organization with the mission to “Do The Most Good,” is dedicated to feeding, clothing, comforting, and caring for those in need throughout the world. Haan, who oversees the Western Region in the U.S., manages a widely dispersed network that extends from Montana to as far as Guam. This poses a geographical challenge for Haan, as his lean team manages over 600 locations of thrift stores, youth centers, and elderly care facilities dispersed throughout the region.

Stacked devices to be configured in a hotel in San Francisco in 2011.

Haan hosted these parties to maintain consistency and accuracy for each of the device configurations. The team would be sent to a single location in cities like Portland, Phoenix, and San Francisco, where they would post up, un-box, and start configuring.

List of devices to configure during a Router Party in 2013.

There was always a large number of devices being configured for hundreds of sites, which meant the team was usually up “configuring boxes until 2 AM,” as Haan described it. But that’s what needed to be done. At the end of each Router Party, Haan and his team would re-box and ship them to each location.

Then one day, someone brought in a Cisco Meraki wireless AP. “It was cute and nice, but we were a full shop with the previous vendor at the time, and we weren’t willing to change that,” explained Haan. However, after they experienced a “catastrophic failure” of their network infrastructure, Haan decided to give Meraki a try.

Since then, everything has changed. By introducing Meraki, Haan not only changed the network infrastructure of the Western Region, but he also changed the philosophy and mindset with his team about what IT management meant, and how simplicity does not have to mean less powerful technology.

Today, The Salvation Army is a full Meraki shop with MX security appliances, MR wireless APs, and MS switches. They’re also trialing Systems Manager for enterprise mobility management, as well as MV security cameras. Watch our webinar from March 22nd at 11 AM PT, to hear from Haan about the unique challenges The Salvation Army faced, and how they use Meraki to build a reliable infrastructure and positively impact the business. 

The post From 2 AM Router Parties to the Meraki Dashboard appeared first on The Meraki Blog.

On Thursday, February 9th at 10 AM PT, Stanton will join us in a live conversation to share how A Wireless evaluated and decided on Cisco Meraki as their solution of choice for national expansion.

As A Wireless acquired new stores, they also acquired a mix of IT networking solutions and vendor products. They found themselves with a network built on varying technologies, configurations, and management systems. Implementing a standardized network and centralized management was essential for their continued success. 

Over a 3-year period, A Wireless have saved in excess of 80% in the total cost of ownership of the network, compared to a more traditional networking solution.

A Wireless TCO Cost Savings

Over 670 stores already fitted with a full suite of Meraki solutions, including MX Security Appliances, MR Access Points, MS Switches, and even a few MC Phones. Now, Stanton and his team are ready to deploy the next 500 locations with the same products and by the final deployment, all 1,170 stores will be full Meraki shops without any other network vendor solutions.

View a recording of this webinar, A Wireless, A Verizon Premium Retailer: Scaling Nationally with Meraki, here: [Link]

The post How One Retailer Took Over the Nation with Meraki appeared first on The Meraki Blog.