Meraki SD-WAN Primary Use Case

FR
Senior Policy Advisor at Freelancer on SD wan

Our company is an integration partner with Cisco and we use the solution to provide internet or wireless connectivity for customers. 

One of our clients is a grocery chain with 200 locations in Mexico. They might be called  liquor stores in the USA but in Mexico, these stores are bigger and also provide fast service for groceries such as fruits and vegetables. The stores are located in remote places where internet is not the best option. 

The stores had residential internet with modem or router, no MPLS, and no capacity for more than 10 to 20 simultaneous connections. Wireless internet, cell phones, or POS did not function well but were critical to business. 

The solution provides a great benefit because MLPS is not needed to receive  great connections. MX65s were installed in the stores and the MX105 was installed at the company's headquarters. 

The solution brings a redundancy of cellular internet with management access for security policies and the network at each store via Meraki's software. The customer is able to manage and configure routers remotely. Connectivity is improved for customers, the POS, CCTV, and the bar code reader. 

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OA
EMEA Network Operations Team Lead at LafargeHolcim

Our primary use is providing services to clients. I work as a regional team lead for network operations. Part of the responsibilities include looking out for evolving technologies and leverage cost benefits while improving services. Because I overlook 1,600 sites within the organizations spread across 52 countries, we can use that buying power to influence pricing.  

When we started using Meraki in 2016, we were just experimenting. By virtue of the results that we got based on using Meraki — the flexibility coupled with the simplicity at the same time realizing that we would experience significant cost optimization — that made Meraki our option A. In our initial estimation, we were able to reduce about 30% of our recurring costs on one site. Since we decided to go with it, we just rolled out 230 sites to the platform and we have many more sites that are coming on to the platform over the next year.  

In fact, next year we are targeting about 1,000 sites to be on the platform. We started with just three sites as a test in 2016 and today that has grown to 230. It keeps growing because more countries have heard about the cost optimization and they are indicating their interest having heard the result. For instance, Switzerland has been the latest country we converted. We have 65 sites in Switzerland. We started the project in June and we have been able to move 59 of the 65 sites to Meraki as of today. At the end of this month, the entire migration for the whole of Switzerland will be complete. That is 65 sites in just 4 months.  

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AH
Production Operator at Al Ghurair Investments

Our company uses the solution for side-to-side or branch connectivity to our data center. We have 70 branches and about 3,000 end users in our environment.  

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Buyer's Guide
Meraki SD-WAN
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Meraki SD-WAN. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Kristof Spriet - PeerSpot reviewer
Products & Solutions Manager at Proximus

I primarily use it to connect sites to each other over an overlay network, with protection from the next-generation firewall in the Meraki ecosystem.

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Martyn Walker - PeerSpot reviewer
Business development manager at Virgin Media

We are using this solution for productivity, in terms of the users, and simplicity in terms of ease of management, although the capabilities of the platforms are a little restricted. As is the resilience, just because of the hub and spoke nature at significant volume. I use the solution a lot in retail stores.

The solution is deployed on-prem and on the cloud. We are using the latest version.

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Ganesh Khutwad - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at Rich Products

Meraki SD-WAN offers a platform where Cisco manages your database. The platform is cloud-based and accessible through the URL. This means that Cisco has access to all of your devices, but it also means that if you need to make changes, Cisco can control it. One of the benefits of this system is that if you experience any loss of connectivity, Cisco can support you.

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WG
Senior Product Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

I work for a carrier, and we consume, resell, and integrate Cisco products. I'm a product manager, and I have a couple of products that are built around Cisco Meraki's offerings. One of them is a managed business wifi solution, and the other one is an SD-WAN solution. I own both of these products. 

Meraki is really big in retail and education, and that's where we see a lot of use cases. It is a low-cost or entry product. It is not a sophisticated, complete solution. People who are very concerned about the total cost of ownership will look at a Meraki solution more. 

The deployment is a combination. The orchestration is on a public cloud, and then the customer locations are all premise-based Meraki devices.

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RR
Owner at a computer software company with 11-50 employees

We primarily use the access points and switches for remote locations for a client. We have 100 or more remote offices, and we connect those together to a data center in Florida.

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HORACIO ELMAN - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Administrator at Jushi

The solution has the ability to jump from one ISP to another with minimum downtime.

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Thomas Christen - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at Bechtle

We mainly use Meraki SD-WAN for connecting sites.

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Nader-Elmansi - PeerSpot reviewer
Presales System Engineer at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

Meraki SD-WAN is connected to branches and the data center. You can also connect branches or connect remote users to their respective offices. It enables users working in hybrid environments, whether from the office or home, to access their applications on the cloud.

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CP
Associate Director of Network Tower at Happiest Minds Technologies

It's for enterprise networking. So some of the customers are from the BFSA domain, and some of the customers are from manufacturing. It's a distributed customer base.

Any customer looking for a single solution that can serve them for network security, which can serve them for the SD-Branch all branch networking. We use it for this purpose. It's used for a combination of SD-WAN and SD-Branch plus security.

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Wilson Salas - PeerSpot reviewer
Arquitecto de Infraestructura y Networking at Teuno

Our use cases are mostly in the financial sector. 

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MR
Senior Advisor at a recruiting/HR firm with 11-50 employees

We implemented Meraki SD-WAN to replace our traditional WAN infrastructure, particularly for our email and messaging system (referred to as MLSP).

We have successfully transitioned to SD-WAN. So, it's primarily used for connecting our remote sites.

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MA
Associate Senior Researcher at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

We are resellers. We provide solutions including Meraki SD-WAN to our clients.

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LD
Vice president for IT at a performing arts with 51-200 employees

We used Meraki SD-WAN for connectivity between our stores, primary data center, and service locations.

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JG
Field service manager at reduno.com

The solution is used principally to have high availability services, high-quality services, and communication with two or more service providers in the same place.

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KM
Production of pharmaceutical products at khaled.miles@labosalem.com

Meraki SD-WAN is used to manage traffic between customers. We can make traffic-shaping rules, limit or deny sites, etc. SD-WAN can also do load balancing.

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JA
IT Manager at Farmacias Benavides SAB de CV

We use Meraki SD-WAN for SD-WAN and WiFi.

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DharmeshPatel - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder & CEO at 7Array Solutions private limited

We use it to provide our customers with a single dashboard for visibility, monitoring, and control across the networks. It makes it easy for us to integrate particular services with the customer's overall requirements.

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MK
Sales Executive at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

I'm a vendor. I sell the solution to clients. 

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Jóhann G. Thorarensen - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at Sund Upper Secondary School

I'm using Cisco Meraki, both for the firewall and software-defined network.  

For the time being, we are sort of picking out the best way to use it in terms of the number of licenses and what we actually need to be able to oversee and have control over — what we really need to do. We are still looking at what are the most essential parts and whether we should increase the number of licenses or just to keep what we already have at the moment. We are taking it step-by-step for now.  

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SM
Owner at a consultancy with 1-10 employees

We have multiple ISP's connected, usually it's two. Two ISP's per site and we have to make sure that the site-to-site connectivity is managed and is maintained — the redundancy has to be maintained. 

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CS
CTO at Tecsud S.p.A.

Primarily, we focus on small businesses, offering solutions that are not overly large deployment but impactful. For instance, we helped a company with an employee in four locations to implement Meraki SD-WAN after other solutions failed. It worked perfectly. 

We also support a retailer with six locations using SD-WAN, among other small to medium-sized deployments, including teleworker solutions.

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NK
Director at BLOCK EDGE TECHNOLOGIES

One of my clients is using Meraki SD-WAN in their office to manage their internal desktops, internal servers, and laptops. Any connectivity for the home-based workers is managed by Cisco Meraki Switches.

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Luke Wainwright - PeerSpot reviewer
Cybersecurity Engineer at Networks Unlimited Africa

Meraki SD-WAN serves as our SD-WAN. As I previously stated, we have over a thousand retail stores across the country, and we have Cisco Meraki at each one. 

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SivaKumar6 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Development Manager at Westcon-Comstor

I am the architecture lead.

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WM
Global Client Partner for Philips at a government with 10,001+ employees

What we do is, we sell Meraki SD-WAN to our customers as a service and they use it for multiple purposes. For example, they use it for data, voice traffic, video, and services that are now in their data centers.

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RL
SD-WAN Sr. Product Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

We are customers of Meraki and I'm the company product manager. 

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Akshay Kharkar - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at Manschaft IT Pvt Ltd

Instead of having MPLS or direct, separate internet connections at each branch location, we can use SD-WAN to route the traffic to data centers. If someone is hosting applications or other web servers in a data center, we can route that traffic toward the data center where the application server is located, and they can access a wired local service provider.

It's deployed on the cloud and can be managed from the cloud. It only needs to be connected to the internet, and then it will start communicating with the Meraki Cloud. If it's connected to the cloud, it will sync the configuration on the cloud to that device.

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AS
Director IT/TI for Cloud SME at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

We primarily use it to provide SD-WAN solutions for our customers.

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KR
IP Network Architect/Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our customers. It allows our users to have their main LAN on the internet.

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TC
Consultant at Bechtle Steffen Schweiz Ag

We primarily use the solution for our branch offices.

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Cesar Argel - PeerSpot reviewer
Director de PMO at Cibergenius S.A.S

We are partners with Cisco Meraki. Our clients need to centralize the administration.

We have seven engineers assigned to maintain and deploy this solution.

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BM
CTO Training & Consulting at a educational organization with 51-200 employees

It allows us to steer the traffic into two parallel links.

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Samuel-Emesoronye - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

We are a tech services company and the Meraki SD-WAN is one of the solutions that I provide to my customers and have experience with.

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AR
Solution Architect at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

We primarily use the solution for two purposes. One is to connect the different locations, and the other is for security.

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SH
Senior Network Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Our primary use case is to break out the traffic at the local location and for the center line management. We want to have these two main objectives, breakout traffic, local traffic, and single management.

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NJ
Senior Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

We are a reseller and Meraki SD-WAN is one of the products that I design and offer to my customers.

Meraki SD-WAN is used to connect office branches.

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VR
Network and Cyber Security Presales Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The primary use case of this solution is for optimization, load balancing, and the different end links. We have a variety of customer enterprises that consist of small, medium, and large-size enterprise customers. More of our clients are moving to direct internet access, so we are getting rid of the current MPLS solutions.

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TEDDY LLANO - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Yssy

Meraki SD-WAN can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud.

I am using Meraki SD-WAN for small to medium-sized customers.

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DR
Vice President Of Services at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

We primarily use the solution for basic connectivity. That's about it at this time. 

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LK
Corporate Head of Digital Solutions Development Strategy | Smart Cities and 4.0 Industry at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

I have been using this solution in my house for testing security devices.

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LM
Head Of Technology at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

We are a system integrator and Meraki SD-WAN is one of the products that we have implemented for our clients.

One of our simple use cases is an ISP environment where they required redundant connectivity.

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Jibin Baby - PeerSpot reviewer
Co Founder at Aintree Tech Solutions Pvt Ltd

The primary use cases are bandwidth management, link aggregation, firewall features, and centralized monitoring.

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MZ
Junior System Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

We are a company that provides IT solutions to other companies and this is one of the products that we implement for others.

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JK
ACT Solutions Architect at a venture capital & private equity firm with 51-200 employees

This is a software-defined networking solution in a wide area network.

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it_user869685 - PeerSpot reviewer
Partner and Chairman at Engitel

We did only a short evaluation focused in training to show the main functions of the dashboard and VPN implementation.

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Buyer's Guide
Meraki SD-WAN
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Meraki SD-WAN. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.