Cloud-Managed IT for Modern Organisations
Modern networks are vast and complex, spanning the globe to make information available to everyone within an organisation and have begun to encompass new areas of technology. The internet has unlocked tremendous new capabilities and technologies, but these innovations require persistent and reliable network connectivity.The Cloud is driving an insatiable demand for faster, more reliable network access, and for IT organisations the pressure is on.
Cisco Meraki offers a comprehensive portfolio of Cloud-Managed IT solutions designed to work together to help deliver a modern network that is powerful, reliable, and easy to manage. An active internet connection and a browser is everything you need in order to manage Meraki products from anywhere, even from a mobile device. This unique approach to IT aims to simplify powerful technology by reducing the overhead and costs associated with maintaining disparate solutions.
Advantages of Cloud-Managed IT
Meraki offers an extensive portfolio of IT products designed for the modern enterprise. These products include wireless access points, security appliances, access and distribution switching. VoIP phones, mobility management, and video surveilance and are each built to work together to help deliver a truly scalable and easy to manage comprehensive IT solution.
This architecture aims to reduce costs and simplify the way ocustomers interact with the network by adding powerful tools and new insights into user behaviour, traffic patterns, and network events. In addition to these core advantages, the Meraki solution also provides all of the components needed to deliver pervasive connectivity to an organisation by offloading many of the supporting services to the Meraki Cloud.
Simplifying Network Management
IT products typically require three stages of interaction - initial deployment, device management, and maintenance. It is worth highlighting the uniqueness of these stages as it applies to the Meraki solution.
Initial configuration and deployment - With Meraki Cloud management, products are easily added to the Dashboard and can be immediately provisioned without unboxing the hardware, allowing IT to benefit from a zero-touch deployment model. Once powered and connected, all Meraki products will automatically search for an Internet path, check for any available software updates, and fetch any configuartion that was staged.
Management - Meraki's Dashboard makes it extremely easy to verify that all network devices are connected, have the latest software, and are up-to-date.
Support and maintenance - Logging, alerting, and debugging tools are all built directly into each product, and are easily accessible via the Dashboard, or a variety of other services. Get notified by the Meraki Cloud if a device loses connectivity, or easily find troublemakers on the network with our automated network summary reports which highligh network anomalies before impacting users.
End-to-End Visibility
As businesses grow and evolve, IT teams are faced with new challenges as hey work to accomodate more users, new locations and technology demands while maintaining performance and keeping costs down. Visibility and insight into the health of the services being delivered can be crucial in helping organisations navigate these challenges and can also be important in making technology decisions.
Visibility is one of the cornerstones of Meraki technology. Using powerful Cloud computing, we are able to highlight network trends and anomalies instantl, providing new insight into exactly how the network is being used, and where trouble might be lurking.
Streamlining Configuration and Eliminating Errors
Increasing demand for secure and high performing netwrok services tends to also introduce complexity. Quality of service, network access control, redundancy and warm sparing, device roaming and advanced call routing are features most administrators are intimately familiar with. These are also complex to configure, and therefore the margin for error is high. One misstep and an important teleconference meeting can end in disaster.
With a Meraki network, configuring even the most advanced features becopmes straightforward. This is made possible by leveraging the Cloud to help construct and issue advanced configurations to all network elements simultaneously, from access points and switches to the network gateway.
Enhanced Security
In addition to deep network visibility, Meraki products also support powerful security capabilities built in and designed to integrate seamlessly. A great example is network authetication via System Manager Sentry, a technology that uses Meraki Systems Manager, Cisco's Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solution, to easily and securely authenticate users across the entire network.
Improved Network Reliability
Managing enterprise networks has long remained fairly unchanged. Over the years, many organisations have resorted to building their own monitoring solutions, custom scripts, and troubleshooting systems in order to remain efficient and proactive.
The reporting, alerting and logging capabilities of any enterprise network are critical as they are the first line of defense and can inform IT when something's amiss. It can take significant time to properly configure these services, and can require additional dedicated infrastructure. If not properly set up, these services can be extremely error prone.
All Meraki products include an expansive set of monitoring and logging tools, built directly into the dashboard. Meraki products double as distributed monitoring nodes, providing valuable information about how the entire network is performing in real-time.
Improved Troubleshooting Capability
If a Meraki device loses connectivity or a local internet service is disrupted, an alert will immediately inform administrators that something's amiss. It is then possible to respond from anywhere with an internet connection, or by using each device's local status page, if necessary.
Technology That Simply Works
As organisations adopt new technologies to increase productivity and reduce costs, pervasive connectivity will be fundamental in helping employees stay focussed on the organisations mission. Whether updating an existing network or expanding into new offices and countries, consider the many benefits that Meraki's complete portfolio of networking and IT products can add.