Case Studies

With more and more chapters rolling over to a complete Meraki setup, the team has been pleased with the easy plug-and-play nature of Meraki hardware. All Meraki hardware can be pre-configured from the cloud dashboard, shipped to a remote location, and once plugged in, automatically download all settings. This simplifies deploying hardware to dozens of distant sites, as do templates in the Meraki dashboard that allow the cloning of existing settings to new networks. If necessary, tweaking settings and applying custom policies can be done at any time from any device that has access to the Meraki dashboard. The granular control and deep insight aorded by Meraki make monitoring and adjusting network settings easy and empowering. "We ran into a situation with a local IT vendor that one of our chapters had previously been paying to help manage the network and servers locally at the chapter who didn't provide us with any passwords or other important information when we converted the chapter over to Meraki. We plugged in the Meraki hardware, started sning around, and we were able to discover what was going on and replace the current setup without their help, and with very limited downtime for the chapter. This experience turned one of our senior engineers, originally a skeptic, into a true Meraki believer," shared Je. As Make-A-Wish America continues to roll out Meraki to all of their chapters, they know they can depend on the reliability, flexibility, and future-proof nature of their cloud managed IT. Cisco Systems, Inc. | 500 Terry A. Francois Blvd, San Francisco, CA 94158 | (415) 432-1000 Case Study | Make-A-Wish "We've also seen great cost savings with Meraki, from the initial hardware purchase to the time and labor savings that we continue to experience," he said. When new interns started, the team noticed a few network slowdowns. Drilling into the aected networks from their Meraki dashboard, the IT team soon noticed a music streaming app taking up a disproportionate amount of bandwidth, and were able to create rules on the network level to limit bandwidth for that specific application in just a few minutes. The team has also been able to remotely troubleshoot using alerts and live tools. These pings, cable tests, and packet captures combined with the granular visibility into each network has allowed Make-A-Wish to report ISP issues and address power outages as soon as they occur, saving time and money for the organization. "A chapter might not think to call in and tell us there's a thunderstorm happening, but we want to know when a storm causes the power to go out and the network to go down. With Meraki, now we know," shared Je.

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