Issue link: https://insights.oneneck.com/i/1226298
Cisco Systems, Inc. | 500 Terry A. Francois Blvd, San Francisco, CA 94158 | (415) 432-1000 Case Study | Make-A-Wish Based in Phoenix, Arizona, Make-A-Wish® is a nonprofit with a powerful mission to grant the wish of every child diagnosed with a life-threatening medical condition. Whether it's becoming a pilot, going bug hunting, or beautifying the neighborhood, Make-A-Wish and its 27,000 volunteers work to make every wish come true. With a wish being granted, on average, every 35 minutes, Make-A-Wish does not have the bandwidth to deal with an unreliable network. To enable employees to spend as much time as possible granting wishes, Make-A-Wish turns to Meraki cloud managed access points, switches, security appliances, and mobility management for a reliable, comprehensive, and empowering IT solution. Je Pick, Director of Technology for Make-A-Wish America, works at the National Oce in Phoenix to support the 62 local Make-A-Wish chapters around the country. When he began working at Make-A-Wish, each chapter had its own networking gear, and there was no way to troubleshoot or easily communicate between chapters. Alongside the management challenges that accompanied this agglomeration of patchwork equipment, leadership was also calling for an increase in security and governance across the organization. With approximately 110 physical locations and a lean team of engineers, Je knew he needed a secure, easy-to-use, centralized management platform to eciently support each location and meet the Board's requirements. Enter Meraki. After evaluating many competing networking solutions, Make-A-Wish chose to go with a full Meraki setup at every location. "Meraki was cost-eective with a good feature set. We did a trial, and it was so easy to configure, and could notify us if anything was going wrong on the network," he said. At every Make-A-Wish chapter, you will soon be able to find a Meraki MX Security Appliance, MS Switch, and a number of MR Access Points as Je and his team continue rolling each location over to Meraki. "It was so easy to configure, and could notify us if anything was going wrong on the network." -Jeff Pick, Director of Technology