Meraki MR34 Cloud Managed AP MR34-HW Prospecto

Conclusion

Providing greater visibility beyond simple network management allows admins to understand user 
behavior and network utilization on their infrastructure. Meraki’s policy management tools facilitate 
the creation of application-aware firewall and traffic shaping rules that can be used to optimize 
network performance and deliver a high quality of experience for end-users. By using Meraki, 
administrators can now count on rich application-layer insights across their edge access layer to 
fully understand user behavior. They can then leverage a flexible policy toolkit that allows for the 
creation and application of specific application policies down to a per-user basis. Both traditional 
IT staff and marketing departments can use Meraki’s MX, MS and MR product lines to obtain the 
visibility required to optimize network performance, and ultimately build a scalable application-
aware architecture that is built to last for the new BYOD and cloud apps era. 

Meraki’s application-layer analysis is performed at the edge across our wired or wireless product 
lines, whereas traditional solutions have required a consolidated and dedicated appliance 
somewhere within the network core. The requirement to have a centrally positioned appliance can 
present numerous disadvantages, including (a) the need to specifically architect the network such 
that all traffic flows through this appliance, (b) the creation of a single point of failure, and (c) limited 
scalability due to constrained 

CPU

 from a single appliance. Separate appliances also come with a 

high cost and are often licensed on an endpoint basis, which can lead to spiralling costs if there are 
large numbers of edge devices (e.g. 1000 APs). Meraki’s traffic analysis capabilities are baked into 
the cost of an Enterprise Cloud license (and so are the recent analytics upgrades). 

Secondly, Meraki is able to leverage the power of its cloud platform for rapid aggregation, 
analysis and customized presentation of statistics based on adjustable variables. Examples 
include being able to view consolidated statistics in a single view across multiple geographical 
sites, along with per-network, per-user and per-application breakdowns with the ability to sort and 
customize the data that is being viewed. Leveraging Meraki’s rapidly growing custom databases 
and geographic data-center spread, ‘big data’ processing is possible, which allows for a large-
scale synthesis and presentation of network statistics that would not be possible in single-box or 
enterprise-hosted architectures. 

Finally, Meraki’s MR and MX wireless and security appliance lines come coupled with the ability 
to create and apply custom application signatures and traffic shaping policies, which allow for 
network optimization based on perceived network trends. Leveraging Meraki’s powerful device 
fingerprinting and real-time client searches, it is possible to filter and apply policies to custom 
groups of users quickly. Following the policy creation and application, an ability to measure 
the policy impact in terms of application and network usage is also key. Measuring the impacts 
of policy changes is also intuitive via the Meraki Dashboard, and this visibility facilitates quick 
adjustments to policies to help administrators track and optimize their network performance in a 
manner not otherwise possible with traditional enterprise equipment.