Cisco Meraki SD-WAN vs. SD-WAN Concierge

At our level, we had to optimize our 3 internet links (MPLS and LTE) with applications like O365, SAP, Microsoft CRM Dynamics and our collaborative work tools like Teams. We also had to ensure that both client workstations and servers could communicate with minimal latency with our Microsoft Intune infrastructure.

Incentivized

The underlying product (Velocloud) is not the issue, Windstream is. Anything this company touches turns to crap.

• Give insights in ALL what is happening on the network
• Trouble shoot in case of a problem
• Once in the Meraki family, you can expand with for example Cisco Spaces / Thousandeyes / Umbrella, and all that within one dashboard
• API possibilities are huge

Incentivized

• Failover is easy, no single point of failure, provided you have the bandwidth.

• AutoVPN sites to site firewall rules needs to be improved
• there is no logging or any insights which would be able to tell you what are the hit counts or actual usage for site to site firewall rules
• SD-WAN plus license includes Smart breakout which has only few applications and those do not work properly, so it is quite useless
• VPN exclusions (local internet breakout) for TCP/UDP type of traffic can not be specified with port ranges
• VPN exclusions (local internet breakout) can be defined only for destinations, but not the sources. It is policy based routing which should support also Source definition

Incentivized

• While the product may work decently once implemented, Windstream is a constant roadblock.
• Trouble issues need to be escalated before people will bother to work on them.

We implemented Meraki in most of our organization sites, so we are always looking for ways of improving its usage, add more features and discover characteristics that we do not know we already have. As it is an easy to use tool and we are growing, hiring new employees, it is really simple to onboard the new joiners.

Incentivized

Its usable very well

Incentivized

Fast and efficient. The only issue currently is that the support is only overseas support and not in South Africa, which causes delays in resolution for some cases. Escalating issues is quite simple and the opening of new cases from the dashboard is easy. I have never had a support issue that could not be resolved.

Incentivized

We did a very stringent valuation a few years ago. And we evaluated probably about a dozen suppliers on paper that we evaluate just by capabilities. And, we of some other business criteria, and we whittled that down to a list of five. And out of those five, we brought four of those into our lab environment where we ran approximately 350 different test cases on, we really beat on it pretty heavily. And some of those other suppliers would've been companies like Fortinet Versa Networks Silver Peak, which is now owned by Hewlett Packard.

Incentivized

Being a cloud-first solution, Meraki Dashboard will scale as needed without any effort for the client. The Meraki cloud will provision (upscale and downscale) the resources as you grow or shrink in size. You only have to physically install the MX on your site, all the management is one through the Internet via Meraki Dashboard. Worth noting that you can fully-configure the MX prior to the physical installation on site.

Incentivized

• It was mostly around logs. I mean I understand because the aim is to provide the simplified solution to the people as an end user, be it an IT manager or the oil team. So I understand where you don't have lots of tools assigned where you can actually take help from the track. But in terms of having that logging information, I think that's where it's been a bit of a kind of journey where struggling, we have been struggling there.

Incentivized

• One outage on our main site cost over 500K in lost revenue for a day, Windstream was unapologetic for failing to set a QOS policy right during cutover.
• We needed to get a building re-wired to get the install at one location going. Windstream said, let us quote it... It took them 2 months to get us a quote that was 4x higher than a local provider. Thankfully, this didn't impact the deployment schedule.