Cisco Meraki MX Still At The Top!

Cisco Meraki MX is the dashboarding UI that comes with Cisco network appliances and we use it as an interface for our current router, MX 100 which handles the organization and processing of network traffic in our environment. With the Cisco Meraki, we are able to see all of the network traffic that flows through our environment and notice any issues with connectivity within our local and external sites.

Meraki's ease of deployment was exceptional. Out of the box, all of the Cisco appliances contain the Meraki dashboard tool so once it's set up once, they make it very easy for other appliances to join your already existing, Meraki environment. From there, the device adoption is pretty much automated as Meraki allows you to push down configurations easily and your new devices are up and running quickly. We are also easily able to manage users who have access to Meraki making the portal very easy to get set up.

Currently, after the onset of COVID 19, we are fully committed in a fully hybrid work environment where our employees have the ability to log on anywhere in the world and carry on about their work day or come into the office as needed. With our completed implementation of fully hybrid work environment, we utilized Cisco Meraki VPN to ensure that our employees can access any network related resources at all times in the day and its been quite successful in being available and secure.

The main challenges we faced when transitioning from in office to hybrid is figuring out how employees could access file shares and other network resources, even printers. Thankfully after setting up Cisco Meraki VPN, it was a seamless transition and it allowed our users to have access to everything they needed anywhere in the world. We also had security in mind and we are pleasantly surprised with the security features baked in Meraki.

With Cisco's hybrid work solutions, we can give everyone the peace of mind that they dont have to physically be in office to get their job done. Also, with Cisco's hybrid work solutions we can cultivate and foster an environment where we can easily manage our remote work force and grow that work force knowing that it is stable and scalable. We are now able to hire talent all around the country while allowing them to have all the access they need as if they were in on of our offices.

In our hyrbid work model, the main thing we have noticed is the flexibility everyone now feels about work. For many this has been a huge blessing as its allowed them to be more productive to work in an environment thats comfortable to them. Also, this has only fortified our trust in our workforce even more as being in hybrid work environment shows that our teams can be just as productive or even more productive working in an environment of their choosing.

The main reason we chose Cisco to support our hybrid work environment is because we currently use Cisco in our network stack. Cisco is the backbone of our network from switches, routers, to even phones. Any other products, would have to spend more time to integrate with Cisco which is why we chose to stay within Cisco because of the compatibility.