Share your experience using Midokura

The solution reduces the cost for the customers. They need not buy a separate Ethernet line from an ISP.

The solution provides a lot of benefits to the customers. Its functionality is very good. The tool is easy to use. The site-to-site connectivity is very good. The product is flexible. It has logs and reports. If anything happens, it's easy to diagnose the problem.

The integration with other tools must be improved.

I am using the solution currently.

The tool is very stable. I rate the stability a ten out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability a ten out of ten. It is very easy to expand it when I get more demand from the customer. The connectivity is very good.

The support is very good on all levels.

It is easy to deploy the product. The configuration is easy. The deployment is easier compared to products.

The product provides customers with good security and scalability.

The product is not expensive. It is reasonably priced. We can pay the subscription fee annually or once in three years.

I will recommend the tool to others. Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

Primarily, we focus on small businesses, offering solutions that are not overly large deployment but impactful. For instance, we helped a company with an employee in four locations to implement Meraki SD-WAN after other solutions failed. It worked perfectly. 

We also support a retailer with six locations using SD-WAN, among other small to medium-sized deployments, including teleworker solutions.

Meraki SD-WAN simplified branch network management for the organization.

It's practically a set-and-forget solution. It just works. Once it's configured and designed properly, we just press the button and it just works seamlessly, eliminating the need for continuous adjustments or monitoring. It is extremely simple to use.  

It's greatly simplified our operations. While not the most flexible, it suits the needs of about 90% of our clients perfectly, making it a reliable and straightforward choice for our network solutions.

It has improved the site-to-site connectivity. For instance, there's this hardware store company. They had tried different solutions since they couldn't afford the big names like FibTeller and Olathe. They were looking for cost-effective solutions. 

They had Google WAN at every site and experimented with MicroTik gear, which is very affordable and flexible but didn't suit their needs. We conducted a quick proof of concept between a few sites with Meraki, and it worked flawlessly right from the start. They replaced all the other equipment with Meraki and haven't looked back, continually expanding with more Meraki solutions.

Moreover, its cloud management platform made a difference in managing the network. 

It's made managing our client's networks extremely easy, regardless of my location. Being able to hop on my cell phone to see what's happening on a client's network makes everything much more manageable.

The first feature I like is the SD-WAN. Second is Advanced Malware Protection (AMP), the threat protection. And third, would be the content filters. Those three together work extremely well. 

It's not perfect, but none of the solutions are because the pricing keeps going all over the place. But with the change they did a couple of years back to Talos, using the real Cisco threat protection system and intelligence, that's really worked quite well. And it does work very nicely maybe not for huge corporate rollouts in the thousands. But certainly, in the small media business, it works quite well. 

If you can scan the pricing and the fact that if you don't have a license, they just stop working, which is a kind of a big hurdle you have to get people to understand that you're just basically buying a subscription in that bit. You're not buying hardware; you're buying a subscription.

Moreover, the Auto VPN feature benefited the organization. We've had virtually zero support calls regarding the Auto VPN feature; it just works seamlessly and automatically. 

The only time it requires attention is during the initial setup or when applying special rules, but other than that, it operates automatically without issues.

It is effective and easy to set up, although a bit expensive, but it gets the job done with a simple configuration. 

However, Meraki isn't as flexible for more unique needs but works excellently within its defined scope.

I'd like to see improvements in the client VPN area. Currently, we use L2TP over IPSec, which, while widely supported, can be buggy on Windows due to Microsoft's implementation, not Meraki's. 

Cisco's AnyConnect is an alternative, but it's proprietary. An open-source option like WireGuard or TailScale, especially WireGuard for compliance reasons, would be a valuable addition to Meraki's offerings. 

WireGuard would be a perfect fit due to its simplicity and set-and-forget configuration

I have been using it for five years now. 

It's very stable. I would rate the stability a nine out of ten simply because there have been a couple of outages. And the outages, when they occur, are in the cloud platform, the Meraki platform, as it's all web-based, internet-based, where there have been some issues with client authentication for the VPN because it's RADIUS-based and it's in the cloud. 

So if the cloud is down, those users can't log in to the VPN, and that's created some issues in the past. In other words, about two years ago, we had a couple of outages, and I had some angry calls.

But apart from that, it's been pretty stable.

It's quite scalable. I read a lot on Reddit, YouTube, and all kinds of stuff, but in trade papers, Meraki apparently scales up very well within the confines of what Meraki can do. 

Now there are companies, like mining companies, who think scaling out, that's when they scale out, they have to do some weird stuff. And that's just what Meraki is just not capable of doing. 

But, for example, schools where they have, or universities typically order for small businesses. They don't generally have very strict, very strange configurations that they need to have working. So, the scalability depends on the client, for example, retail. We can go into one company that has 50 retail stores in all different malls and stuff like that, that scales very well. 

You can have one Meraki with one MX in the central site that has everybody auto-VPN into it. And that works fine. No issues there. So, it does scale within the confines of what Meraki could do.

In our clients, we have anywhere from five users all the way up to a thousand users or more (a school) connected at any one time. So, that's kind of the range with schools and hotels. We also have hotels that do that kind of range.

Sometimes, we encounter someone new who might need a bit of explanation on how Meraki works. Usually, if I'm contacting support, it's for something quite unusual because I handle about 90% of the issues myself. The other 10% might be dashboard-related rather than hardware issues.

Positive

We didn't use any other solution, we sort of fell into Meraki. Initially, we were a Wi-Fi-focused shop, starting with Ruckus. As we expanded, we found Cambium Networks offered great value, becoming our go-to for Wi-Fi solutions. 

We mix Cambium Wi-Fi with Meraki firewalls, which has become a highly successful product for us. Cambium doesn't require licensing, which contrasts with Meraki Wi-Fi, where WE're essentially buying a subscription, not just the hardware. 

It is our best selling product. 

On a scale of one to ten, with ten being very easy to setup, I would rate my experience a ten —super easy. However, it's crucial to understand the quirks of Meraki. 

Someone new to Meraki might find it confusing because its simplicity can be misleading. They might expect complexity and get lost. But once you're familiar with Meraki's approach, setup becomes incredibly straightforward.

Our clients mainly use on-premises deployments. While some applications might be cloud-based, significant data centers are locally situated in Chile. Given our geographical location and the absence of native cloud services, except for a recent introduction by Google, reliance on local data centers is more practical. 

Latency becomes an issue when using major cloud services due to the distance from global cloud data centers. So, for our small to medium-sized business clientele in Chile, which differs in scale from what's considered small to medium in the U.S., local data center usage is the norm, and we rarely see hybrid setups.

I deployed the solution. Deployment for a small client takes half a day. 

One technical person is enough for the deployment. 

I handle the maintenance as well. I get the calls when they get decent support, and our philosophy is when people complain, we teach the client. So the client doesn't have to rely on us for support.

Because we are a very small operation, and so, we had support, we have hundreds of clients who can't support them all. So what we do is we train the clients. 

We generally have a training after the install of however it worked and really train them well on the things that they will have to be doing if they are gonna be managing their own. 

But our philosophy is if the client manages their own system, and with Meraki, you have direct support from the company.  

For a pure SD-WAN solution, the pricing is competitive. However, our clients are on the lower tier in terms of budget, viewing IT more as a necessary expense rather than integral to their business. While Meraki's solution might be pricey for them, there aren't many cheaper, reliable options. 

Other solutions claiming to offer SD-WAN don't match Meraki's sophistication and end up costing about the same, making Meraki's pricing reasonable for the service quality, though still a stretch for our client base.

For our clients, I'd rate it around a seven out of ten in terms of pricing. It's not too expensive compared to high-end SD-WAN solutions like Vitello, but it's still a bit pricey for our client base who are accustomed to more budget-friendly options like TP-Link or inexpensive firewalls.

About five years ago, there weren't many affordable options available that suited our client base. They just weren't a good fit for our client base. Our client base is very small. They weren't going to pay thousands of dollars a year to connect their offices. They just wouldn't do it. So they got by with basic firewalls and just doing a straight tunnel, a VPN tunnel, with SD-WAN, we tunnel it and be done with it" mentality. 

But then, all of a sudden, we started looking at Meraki. We played around with it a little bit, and we were just amazed at how easy it was to set up a VPN and the SD-WAN portion. It was fairly simple. We couldn't believe it because we were used to the world of command-line interface (CLI).

You log in, and then you start typing commands. We have been doing a lot with Cisco ASA firewalls, and those are the biggest pains in the neck. With VPNs and all that stuff, it was horrible.

We're Cisco partners, as well as Fortinet, Aruba, and Ruckus partners. We work with a wide range of partners, making us quite versatile in the industry.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten for our use case. For a bank's use case, they might rate it a two, but for small businesses and schools, it's about an eight out of ten.