A good friend and network admin at several local schools turned me on to “Meraki”, a cloud managed network hardware and system solution. I began using the free mobile device management solution to remotely manage computers phones and tablets… and eventually after drinking enough of the “cool-aid” I began implementing Meraki hardware.
Meraki was founded by some guys at MIT and purchased in December 2012 by Cisco and has been gaining market share as IT professionals realize what it is. The interesting thing is that Cisco has been the big name in networking for a long time but they almost always offered the most difficult to configure hardware of any network hardware company and Meraki is the polar opposite.
You see, up until now IT professionals generally need to individually log into each device such as security appliances, switches, wireless access points and so on to configure each appropriately to work with the overall network structure. What Meraki did was to allow you to register each device so that once it is online you can configure every device from one web console.
So for example if you are running a school campus and you would like to implement a new guest network, add traffic shaping and configure a VPN and monitor usage on a per client basis you can do so in a fraction of the time from a single web console that controls the entire network, a minute or two after the changes are made each hardware device automatically is programed with the changes.
For small and medium organizations solutions like this along with the many other hosted services are lowering the cost of entry to enterprise quality answers. Mathis Consulting is committed to offering these solutions in an unbiased way to provide the best possible solution for small and medium businesses.
