Meraki SD-WAN Reviews

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. 

The different services that we offer from different offices are available wherever we need them. That's the purpose of going with the Meraki SD-WAN solution versus another company. It's very straightforward. Their full mesh network just works. That's important.

The seamless end-to-end setup is really what makes it beautiful; that's why Meraki is good. It's much easier than some of the other vendors to manage and keep track of what's going on because you can see it in real-time on the portal. I don't really feel like VALO Cloud gives you a good idea of what's going on. VALO Cloud devices don't work nearly as well, in my opinion, as the Meraki devices.

I think they should enhance the security. I feel like the security is decent, but some other people that I work with say there are better options available. Cisco requires you to upgrade the firmware to custom firmware on the devices you want to go beyond Diffie-Hellman five. DH5 is in the lower part of the spectrum. Other devices, even Cisco devices are using DH15 or higher. I think DH24 is the highest that's currently available. 

The feature set right now requires a firmware upgrade that's custom to enable that kind of encryption. They should just have it in a dropdown. If they could fix that, I could tell my other colleagues, "Hey, look, Cisco can do it right out of the box." To enable higher-end encryption, higher than Diffie-Hellman five, DH5, requires a custom firmware. If they could make that built into the standard firmware as an option, I would love that. 

I think that from Cisco's perspective, they've chosen not to do that simply because it requires more performance.

That's how they keep it because they say, "Oh, look at the performance. It's the same as the other guy." Yeah, but the other guy's using DH15 or DH14 and you're using DH5. The level of encryption means more horsepower required from the processor on the devices so that's why it increases the footprint. The more CPU, the hotter it gets and then it doesn't last as long; the performance is not as good because it's using more resources, etc. Cisco should definitely sell equipment with better processes or better performance for our processes because that would give us a higher level of encryption on our firewalls.

I have been using Meraki SD-WAN for roughly four to five years.

The setup time is excellent. The ease of setup is excellent. It's a set it and forget it solution. Once we created the mesh network, if we have to change an ISP, it doesn't mean we have to change an entire configuration. We just unplug it, plug the new one in, change the IPs and it works. Some SD-WAN providers give you a valid internet IP address as part of their solution, and others don't. A lot of the SD-WAN providers that provide internet access use Meraki devices as a black box. They just hand off one interface to the client-side and that's it.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Meraki SD-WAN a rating of eight. If they could do better on the performance side, that really would make a difference.

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

The most valuable features of this solution are load balancing and the security possibilities you have.

Meraki is more or less an intelligent load balancing. A lot of features are missing that other SD-WAN solutions have. For example, forward error correction and WAN optimization. These features are missing.

The best thing would be if you could have more than two uplinks in the Meraki Gateways. Also, forward error correction would be nice to have.

We have been using Meraki SD-WAN for approximately a year and a half.

We are using the latest version.

It's very stable.

We are a small company. We have approximately 120 users.

With Meraki, you have only two WAN links. You cannot have more than that.

You can scale it very easily if you want to have thousands of locations, but in every location or with every Meraki WAN gateway, you can only have two WAN uplinks.

We have not contacted technical support, it's always perfect.

Cisco's technical support is very good.

The initial setup is quite simple.

We are a training company that provides training on Meraki. It's a matter of minutes to implement an SD-WAN router.

We have a team that is responsible for maintaining this solution.

If you purchase a Meraki gateway, you have to purchase a license. It's a basic license, and you will have SD-WAN included.

When you buy a Meraki gateway, you already have SD-WAN.

When comparing Meraki SD-WAN with other SD-WAN solutions, Meraki is more or less for free. It's an easy to use solution that helps you to do things that you can't do without SD-WAN. 

It is not as advanced as the Cisco SD-WAN solution, or SD-WAN solutions from other vendors.

It does not have a very rich feature set.

For others who are interested in using Meraki SD-WAN, I would suggest that they know the limitations of the two uplinks and that it is not a separate solution. It's included in what you have. You will not have the same dashboard as you would have with the Cisco SD-WAN, or VeloCloud, VersaStack, etc.

For a free solution, I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

The advantage of Cisco Meraki is that they take the complexity out of the backend, they do it for you. One of the reasons that we switched to Meraki SD-WAN, was because they have a feature called Auto VPN.

I have to keep the operating systems on my switches and routers current and to do that with any other piece of equipment, would literally require me to download the newer operating system. I'd have to get a TFTP server setup to transfer that image over to the appliance. By the time I'd finish, even on the five sites that I have, that's five routers and seven switches.  A combined or aggregated downtime across the sites, potentially of six hours. Whereas now I can schedule the update for the middle of the night or anytime, and it happens on its own.

The portal updates and reboots the device and off it goes. I don't even have to be connected to do it, it just happens. That is of value to me that nobody else is promoting. Between the Auto VPN and the update of the operating systems to keep current, those are the key features.

The network insight and reporting are great.

There are literally things you cannot do in a graphical user interface that can be done from a command line. Certain commands that you can issue to any device from a command line are basically explicit; the same as a server or any other IP or any computer-related piece of hardware. If you can get to the command line, you can give it explicit instructions that basically tell it to do something that's hard to describe in a graphical environment. Periodically, there are some issues that you have to figure out how to work around.  That's a very technical thing, most people won't run into it. 

Six years.

Excellent.

The wide-area network side of the setup was pretty straightforward. I picked up some little details here and there that I wasn't aware of. I had been playing with their equipment for probably a year and a half to two years before I implemented it here. But not for wide-area networking.  With some assistance from Cisco Meraki, as soon as I added appliances, literally within 15 minutes, the site is meshed into the WAN.

Now, since rebuilding the WAN with Cisco Meraki, I keep a cold standby in the closet. All I have to literally do is go to the portal, assign the license to it, and tell it that this is going to replace a defective unit at another site.  I plug that device in, within 15 minutes it will take over. So I'm no longer dependent on an outside resource to get our network up and running again.

That's what's important to me. Is there better equipment out there that can handle more bandwidth and maybe do more things? Yes, but I do not have the bandwidth and may be losing other benefits.

The portal is hosted by Cisco Meraki, it's in their servers someplace. The way routers and firewalls typically are managed, is the way it's been done forever. The way the purists want to do it is via direct access to the unit. Going from unit to unit, configuring and troubleshooting, and doing all the magic. With Meraki, you cannot do an internal configuration from the unit directly. The advantage of this is that the configuration on the device is encrypted. Nobody can walk up to it and reconfigure it. Nobody can gain remote access into it and reconfigure it. So in my mind, the security profile on the unit is actually more secure.

But then, once the unit is installed and assigned to your organization, it's registered in the portal. From there you look at each device and define what it can do, which is the essence of software-defined networking. The portal allows you to configure security, connectivity and filters.  Changes in the portal are communicated to affected devices in a matter of minutes.

I don't know that it's cheaper, but for the Auto VPN and automated updating, it's a time saver for a smaller IT team.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Meraki SD-WAN a rating of ten — it's been working flawlessly for us.

Our connectivity was pretty good even before we used Meraki. After we used Meraki, everything worked fine and still does. The thing is that once we started using Meraki, our management became simpler. It's simpler for us to become simpler.

We have other solutions, and we wanted one that would integrate with our current ones. This product is pretty good and simple, so we learned the simplicity of a product.

We currently use some features. It is secure, and some features, like work device management, are very useful.

We selected this solution because it needs to be always connected. In some cases, like an Internet outage, this can make the solution unmanageable.

If the network disconnects, we have access to the device but cannot make any changes.

I have been using Meraki SD-WAN for the last six months.

During the initial setup, it wasn't stable. It was very problematic, and we had a lot of issues. Now it's very stable.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

The solution’s scalability is good. 2,000 users are using this solution.

We use the Meraki SD-WAN solution daily as users who consume the network. However, our involvement is very limited if you're asking about managing the devices or connecting to them. We barely manage it because it's largely automatic. It works well, so we typically only intervene about once a week.

I rate the solution’s scalability a ten out of ten.

Technical support is very cumbersome. It's not on point. It takes them a lot of time to understand the problems. It's very complex.

Neutral

The initial setup is easy. However, it took us a lot of time to work with an integrator and to declutter, and it took us weeks to deploy.

Meraki is a combination of cloud and on-prem, but most of our deployments are on-prem connected to the cloud. The management of Meraki is always on the cloud, but the devices are on-prem, and we have deployed multiple devices on-prem.

We use a third party for deployment. It still took us a lot of time. 

The product's pricing is moderate.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

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.

I appreciate the cloud-based management feature the most. It's a crucial aspect for me because it allows me to manage the configuration remotely without having to visit the on-premise location. The ability to do this from my home is a major benefit. Additionally, security is good.

I have been using Meraki SD-WAN for approximately two years.

I rate the stability of Meraki SD-WAN a nine out of ten.

When we upgraded from the old Cisco models, we encountered very few challenges during the migration to Meraki SD-WAN. In the future, there may be a few challenges to overcome during migration.

This solution is used mostly in enterprise-sized companies.

I rate the scalability of Meraki SD-WAN a seven out of ten.

I rate the support from Meraki SD-WAN a nine out of ten.

The deployment time of Meraki SD-WAN can vary. For someone new to the process, it could take a couple of hours. However, for someone with hands-on experience, such as myself, it only takes approximately two to three hours to set up the entire configuration.

I rate the initial setup of Meraki SD-WAN a nine out of ten.

We used two people for the deployment of the solution.

I have received a return on investment using this solution. The manageability cost has been reduced.

Pricing is a significant concern for me. Amongst all the firewall brands, Cisco is one of the most expensive options. Despite its reputation and security features, many customers opt for other brands, such as SonicWall because of their lower prices. These other brands offer similar features to Cisco but at a lower cost. Cisco's pricing is something that could be improved to attract more customers. The brand has a good reputation, but when it comes to budgeting and pricing, it is not always the first choice.

The solution is very expensive.

I rate the price of Meraki SD-WAN a nine out of ten.

In my professional network, when people ask me about which brand of switches to use, Meraki SD-WAN is always the first recommendation. However, the final decision often comes down to budget. If a customer has the budget for Meraki SD-WAN, I recommend it, but if budget is a concern, there are other brands that can be considered.

I rate Meraki SD-WAN a nine out of ten

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.

The most valuable feature is the single management plane dashboard. Our organization has a global site, we have separated the area, and we have more than five hundred small sites around the world.

I would like to see more flexibility in our choices of customization for our needs.

I have been using Meraki SD-WAN for several years.

There is definite stability with good performance.

There is good scalability. We have a variety of users. Generally from five to two hundred.

When we consider technical support I would rank them an eight out of ten.

The initial setup is straightforward and easy.  The deployment could take anywhere from one day or longer depending on the integration that was necessary.

We did the implementation through the in-house or internal team.

The pricing is reasonable and we can choose the software or the feature.

I think Meraki SD-WAN is good for five hundred end users or smaller. If they are larger than this I would recommend other solutions for enterprise scenarios. I would rate Meraki SD-WAN an eight on a scale of one to ten.

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.

When I design solutions for my customers, I prefer to offer them a Meraki product to use in their environment.

In my experience, Meraki is very easy, simple, and clear to set up and use.

From my clients, I've heard that the most valuable feature is the simplicity.

There is a point in a very large organization where you hit the VPN limit, or tunnel limit.

I have been working with Meraki SD-WAN over the course of approximately five years.

The feedback that I have received is that it's a pretty stable solution.

When you log a support case with Cisco, they provide quick assistance.

I have not dealt with technical support myself but from the technical staff that we have, it sounds like the support is good.

The feedback that I have received is that it's pretty easy to deploy.

The orchestrator is hosted by Cisco and the platform is hosted by Meraki.

We have an in-house team that is responsible for deployment.

The licensing model is a fair one, although having the hardware means nothing without the license. You need to continue to pay licensing fees.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product would vary depending on the environment. I would make sure that if the customer is using a more mature firewall capability, to verify that Meraki can address some of those features. I would want to see what the customer is accustomed to in terms of functionality and that they don't downgrade.

I would rate Meraki SD-WAN and eight out of ten.

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

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

Meraki SD-WAN is user friendly.

I would like to see more functions added to the next release of Meraki SD-WAN.

Meraki SD-WAN is a scalable solution.

Customer support is very good.

Positive

The initial setup is easy to configure.

The price of this solution is good, it is not expensive.

I would rate this product a 10 out of 10.