IN today’s connectivity-centric world, experience has become the currency of business evolution.
It is the manifestation of the outcomes that can be delivered from a network powered by a cloud-first platform infrastructure with a focus on touchpoints and technologies.
Meraki technologies are the backbone of any IT experience. All stemming from the Meraki Platform and the technologies include next-gen access including Wi-Fi, switching and mobile device management, SASE including SD-WAN and cellular gateways, IoT including cameras and sensors, and machine-learning. Technologies broadly are connectivity, security and intelligence.
The experience equation is the simplified version of how a business can utilise Meraki to deliver experiences to any touchpoint using the appropriate technology. “Touchpoints + Technologies = Experiences”.
Overview
Over the past few years, organisations have been shifting workloads and applications from their data centres to multi-cloud environments, which is defined as the distribution of cloud assets, software and applications across several cloud-hosting environments.
In parallel, most IT organisations run an infrastructure made up of multiple vendors’ technologies. With each added vendor, an IT team’s maintenance, management, and security workload increases.
Multi-vendor environments are inevitably siloed with often-complex integrations that yield limited visibility at best.
For the past year or more, the transition to hybrid work has forcibly accelerated and has brought into sharp focus the challenges organisations face around how to seamlessly transition while maintaining consistent connectivity, security, performance and visibility.
The ultimate problem that IT organisations are being asked to solve is achieving consistency for security and quality of experience (QoE) regardless of an end-user’s location. This is what SASE provides.
SASE defined
Secure access service edge (SASE) is a label for a consolidated architectural solution that combines cloud-native security functions like secure web gateways, cloud access security brokers, firewalls, and zero-trust network access with connectivity functions such as VPN and SD-WAN capabilities.
These functions are merging and are being delivered predominantly as cloud-native services by the SASE vendor for simple, fast, flexible deployments.
Digital business transformation is moving security to the cloud, which drives a need for converged services to reduce complexity, improve speed and agility, and secure the new distributed network architecture.
The SASE model consolidates numerous networking and security functions – traditionally delivered in siloed point solutions – in a single, integrated offering.
The SASE concept is based on cloud-native capabilities that simplify the IT environment while improving security and enabling dynamic scalability.
For the best results with SASE, Gartner recommends that organisations select a single vendor that can provide a broad set of security functions and flexible, high-performance networking that is backed by a reliable track record.
However, a recent ESG Survey indicates that over time, organisations will choose one to three vendors for their SASE implementation.
Meraki SASE solution
As we move upmarket into the Enterprise space, we need to emphasise how the Meraki platform, as the foundation for building a SASE solution, easily addresses our customers converged network connectivity and security needs.
This includes automation through our cloud-first dashboard, scale to provide connectivity and security for thousands of users and/or a large number of locations, as well as extensive analytics provided by our advanced AI/ML capabilities to optimise performance, and accelerate troubleshooting.
An example of how Meraki is converging the networking and security functions can be found in the integration of the Meraki MX SD-WAN security appliance with the Umbrella Secure Internet Gateway (SIG).
Customers can effortlessly start their SASE journey with simplified IPSec tunnel connectivity to achieve fast deployment of Umbrella across distributed locations without leaving the Meraki dashboard.
Streamlined network configurations make it easy to secure cloud access and protect users against Internet threats on – or off network.
Key to the Meraki SASE architecture is the adoption of the MX SD-WAN security appliance which provides best-in-class secure connectivity to cloud-based applications, enhanced user experience by enabling hybrid and remote workers, providing exceptional data and performance visibility from a single point of management, and the ability to prioritise and segment traffic across the WAN.
Join us at the free live webinar “Be ‘Sassy’ & Enable Secure Access Everywhere” on Nov 16 from 2pm-3pm to learn how Cisco Meraki is revolutionising the future of networking security in your SASE journey. The webinar is organised by Star Media Group in partnership with Cisco.
To register for the webinar, visit bit.ly/starcisco16nov, and for any queries, contact events@thestar.com.my