Meraki SD-WAN Primary Use Case
The main USP is visibility and manageability of the solution. With the lean IT team, we can manage the entire show.
View full review »The main use case for Meraki SD-WAN involves working on the basic setup, which consists of Layer 2 switches. It is a very stable solution without the errors or bugs that occur with the Catalyst ones.
Additionally, it has a GUI interface that simplifies troubleshooting and switch issues, making it easier for someone who doesn't have a strong command of CLI to troubleshoot. The GUI facilitates most operations, except for those issues that require vendor support for troubleshooting.
View full review »My role involves tailoring networking solutions, such as Meraki SD-WAN, according to customer requirements. The primary use case is managing enterprise network traffic, focusing on providing managed services to enterprise and mid-market customers by integrating solutions from various vendors.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
Meraki SD-WAN
June 2025

Learn what your peers think about Meraki SD-WAN. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: June 2025.
861,390 professionals have used our research since 2012.
We use the product in a business environment with multiple locations that require high availability, dual circuits, and significant bandwidth. Our needs also include high-end data inspection and firewall capabilities.
View full review »Meraki SD-WAN is software-defined and handles key elements like bandwidth, layer seven applications, and VPN connections via automation. For instance, you can set up and configure auto-mesh connections between sites with minimal effort. The same goes for VLAN configuration; you define it, and the system automates the necessary access lists and rules behind the scenes.
In traditional setups, you'd manually create access control lists and prioritize traffic. With Meraki, it's automated. For example, you can set a rule giving voice packets priority, and Meraki's SD-WAN takes care of it instantly. Voice traffic can be prioritized by directly setting it as a feature or associating it with a specific VLAN. The result is that voice packets have priority while other data traffic utilizes the remaining bandwidth. This dynamic traffic handling is built-in, so you don’t need to write manual rules like you would with other systems.
View full review »MM
Milind Mane
Solution Architect at Tata Consultancy
I use the solution in my company for the firewall, specifically Cisco Meraki MX, which we use mostly for the wireless and the LAN or switching part.
The solution was used in the city. We built a network for city areas to link some of the companies. There are networks in some cities or nearby cities.
View full review »I use the tool for some purposes related to technical checks.
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Girdhar Mishra
Operation Head at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Meraki SD-WAN enhances connectivity across various business locations. There are around five to six locations, so we have SD-WAN connectivity.
View full review »We have ten Meraki devices. Our data center, main office, and other offices are all in North Carolina, and I am in Florida.
Additionally, we have six Meraki devices in our data center. They are doing everything we need them to do. I would normally use it along with Meraki MX as well.
I usually pass it to the senior guy since I am pretty much swamped all day from seven in the morning until midnight.
View full review »We are using it for branch to branch connectivity. We have set up servers and devices all over the DCC to provide local Wi-Fi for all branches to access the server.
View full review »CS
Cristian Salcedo
CTO at Tecsud S.p.A.
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.
View full review »FR
Francisco Javier Romo
Senior Policy Advisor at Freelancer on SD wan
Our company is an integration partner with Cisco and we use the solution to provide internet or wireless connectivity for customers.
One of our clients is a grocery chain with 200 locations in Mexico. They might be called liquor stores in the USA but in Mexico, these stores are bigger and also provide fast service for groceries such as fruits and vegetables. The stores are located in remote places where internet is not the best option.
The stores had residential internet with modem or router, no MPLS, and no capacity for more than 10 to 20 simultaneous connections. Wireless internet, cell phones, or POS did not function well but were critical to business.
The solution provides a great benefit because MLPS is not needed to receive great connections. MX65s were installed in the stores and the MX105 was installed at the company's headquarters.
The solution brings a redundancy of cellular internet with management access for security policies and the network at each store via Meraki's software. The customer is able to manage and configure routers remotely. Connectivity is improved for customers, the POS, CCTV, and the bar code reader.
View full review »I use Meraki SD-WAN in various corporate environments. It's implemented in both small offices, accommodating about twenty people, and larger offices with four hundred to five hundred people. Primarily, it's used to connect corporate networks to the Internet and occasionally between locations.
View full review »WH
Wey Ho
Senior Support Specialist at ICMTEL Pty Ltd
I use Meraki SD-WAN for multi-site VPN connectivity. It is mainly used for creating a mesh kind of site-to-site connection across different industries.
View full review »JO
Julian Ortega
Senior Network Technician at a insurance company with 51-200 employees
The tool makes it easier for us to communicate with other offices without using an MPLS network.
View full review »SR
SurenRupnarrain
IT Manager at a construction company with 51-200 employees
Apart from SQL, I used to work a lot with networking solutions. I am more of a network specialist, and then I started to do SQL after that. I'm experienced with networking rather than application experience for databases.
View full review »AH
Aamir Hussain
Senior Network Specialist at Al Ghurair Investments
Our company uses the solution for side-to-side or branch connectivity to our data center. We have 70 branches and about 3,000 end users in our environment.
View full review »I primarily use it to connect sites to each other over an overlay network, with protection from the next-generation firewall in the Meraki ecosystem.
View full review »It's for enterprise networking. So some of the customers are from the BFSA domain, and some of the customers are from manufacturing. It's a distributed customer base.
Any customer looking for a single solution that can serve them for network security, which can serve them for the SD-Branch all branch networking. We use it for this purpose. It's used for a combination of SD-WAN and SD-Branch plus security.
View full review »MR
Matthew Rogers
Senior Advisor at a recruiting/HR firm with 11-50 employees
We implemented Meraki SD-WAN to replace our traditional WAN infrastructure, particularly for our email and messaging system (referred to as MLSP).
We have successfully transitioned to SD-WAN. So, it's primarily used for connecting our remote sites.
Meraki SD-WAN offers a platform where Cisco manages your database. The platform is cloud-based and accessible through the URL. This means that Cisco has access to all of your devices, but it also means that if you need to make changes, Cisco can control it. One of the benefits of this system is that if you experience any loss of connectivity, Cisco can support you.
View full review »We are using this solution for productivity, in terms of the users, and simplicity in terms of ease of management, although the capabilities of the platforms are a little restricted. As is the resilience, just because of the hub and spoke nature at significant volume. I use the solution a lot in retail stores.
The solution is deployed on-prem and on the cloud. We are using the latest version.
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Olushola Adio
EMEA Network Operations Team Lead at LafargeHolcim
Our primary use is providing services to clients. I work as a regional team lead for network operations. Part of the responsibilities include looking out for evolving technologies and leverage cost benefits while improving services. Because I overlook 1,600 sites within the organizations spread across 52 countries, we can use that buying power to influence pricing.
When we started using Meraki in 2016, we were just experimenting. By virtue of the results that we got based on using Meraki — the flexibility coupled with the simplicity at the same time realizing that we would experience significant cost optimization — that made Meraki our option A. In our initial estimation, we were able to reduce about 30% of our recurring costs on one site. Since we decided to go with it, we just rolled out 230 sites to the platform and we have many more sites that are coming on to the platform over the next year.
In fact, next year we are targeting about 1,000 sites to be on the platform. We started with just three sites as a test in 2016 and today that has grown to 230. It keeps growing because more countries have heard about the cost optimization and they are indicating their interest having heard the result. For instance, Switzerland has been the latest country we converted. We have 65 sites in Switzerland. We started the project in June and we have been able to move 59 of the 65 sites to Meraki as of today. At the end of this month, the entire migration for the whole of Switzerland will be complete. That is 65 sites in just 4 months.
We mainly use Meraki SD-WAN for connecting sites.
View full review »The solution has the ability to jump from one ISP to another with minimum downtime.
View full review »Meraki SD-WAN is a very good product as you get a backup for all the VPN and internet connections. You connect Meraki's cable, and you can have a secure port to deploy Meraki SD-WAN solution in the cloud, which is a very easy process to deploy. You can apply or make appliances for the other branches that you have, so it is easy to deploy Meraki in your network ecosystem.
LD
LongDang
Vice president for IT at a performing arts with 51-200 employees
We used Meraki SD-WAN for connectivity between our stores, primary data center, and service locations.
View full review »We use it to provide our customers with a single dashboard for visibility, monitoring, and control across the networks. It makes it easy for us to integrate particular services with the customer's overall requirements.
View full review »I work for a carrier, and we consume, resell, and integrate Cisco products. I'm a product manager, and I have a couple of products that are built around Cisco Meraki's offerings. One of them is a managed business wifi solution, and the other one is an SD-WAN solution. I own both of these products.
Meraki is really big in retail and education, and that's where we see a lot of use cases. It is a low-cost or entry product. It is not a sophisticated, complete solution. People who are very concerned about the total cost of ownership will look at a Meraki solution more.
The deployment is a combination. The orchestration is on a public cloud, and then the customer locations are all premise-based Meraki devices.
View full review »Meraki SD-WAN is connected to branches and the data center. You can also connect branches or connect remote users to their respective offices. It enables users working in hybrid environments, whether from the office or home, to access their applications on the cloud.
We primarily use the access points and switches for remote locations for a client. We have 100 or more remote offices, and we connect those together to a data center in Florida.
View full review »Instead of having MPLS or direct, separate internet connections at each branch location, we can use SD-WAN to route the traffic to data centers. If someone is hosting applications or other web servers in a data center, we can route that traffic toward the data center where the application server is located, and they can access a wired local service provider.
It's deployed on the cloud and can be managed from the cloud. It only needs to be connected to the internet, and then it will start communicating with the Meraki Cloud. If it's connected to the cloud, it will sync the configuration on the cloud to that device.
View full review »JA
Juan Arguelles
IT Manager at Farmacias Benavides SAB de CV
We use Meraki SD-WAN for SD-WAN and WiFi.
View full review »Our use cases are mostly in the financial sector.
View full review »KM
KHALED MILES
Production of pharmaceutical products at khaled.miles@labosalem.com
Meraki SD-WAN is used to manage traffic between customers. We can make traffic-shaping rules, limit or deny sites, etc. SD-WAN can also do load balancing.
View full review »NK
Narendra-Kumar
Director at BLOCK EDGE TECHNOLOGIES
One of my clients is using Meraki SD-WAN in their office to manage their internal desktops, internal servers, and laptops. Any connectivity for the home-based workers is managed by Cisco Meraki Switches.
View full review »I'm a vendor. I sell the solution to clients.
View full review »Meraki SD-WAN serves as our SD-WAN. As I previously stated, we have over a thousand retail stores across the country, and we have Cisco Meraki at each one.
View full review »I am the architecture lead.
View full review »What we do is, we sell Meraki SD-WAN to our customers as a service and they use it for multiple purposes. For example, they use it for data, voice traffic, video, and services that are now in their data centers.
View full review »JG
Jorge-Gonzalez
Field service manager at reduno.com
The solution is used principally to have high availability services, high-quality services, and communication with two or more service providers in the same place.
View full review »We are customers of Meraki and I'm the company product manager.
View full review »MA
MOhd Alias
Associate Senior Researcher at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
We are resellers. We provide solutions including Meraki SD-WAN to our clients.
View full review »We have multiple ISP's connected, usually it's two. Two ISP's per site and we have to make sure that the site-to-site connectivity is managed and is maintained — the redundancy has to be maintained.
View full review »It allows us to steer the traffic into two parallel links.
View full review »We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our customers. It allows our users to have their main LAN on the internet.
View full review »I'm using Cisco Meraki, both for the firewall and software-defined network.
For the time being, we are sort of picking out the best way to use it in terms of the number of licenses and what we actually need to be able to oversee and have control over — what we really need to do. We are still looking at what are the most essential parts and whether we should increase the number of licenses or just to keep what we already have at the moment. We are taking it step-by-step for now.
View full review »Our connectivity was pretty good even before we used Meraki. After we used Meraki, everything worked fine and still does. The thing is that once we started using Meraki, our management became simpler. It's simpler for us to become simpler.
View full review »Our primary use case is to break out the traffic at the local location and for the center line management. We want to have these two main objectives, breakout traffic, local traffic, and single management.
We are partners with Cisco Meraki. Our clients need to centralize the administration.
We have seven engineers assigned to maintain and deploy this solution.
View full review »We are a system integrator and Meraki SD-WAN is one of the products that we have implemented for our clients.
One of our simple use cases is an ISP environment where they required redundant connectivity.
View full review »The primary use cases are bandwidth management, link aggregation, firewall features, and centralized monitoring.
View full review »We primarily use the solution for basic connectivity. That's about it at this time.
View full review »I have been using this solution in my house for testing security devices.
View full review »We are a tech services company and the Meraki SD-WAN is one of the solutions that I provide to my customers and have experience with.
View full review »MZ
MichielZyde
Junior System Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
We are a company that provides IT solutions to other companies and this is one of the products that we implement for others.
View full review »This is a software-defined networking solution in a wide area network.
View full review »TC
ThomasChristen
Consultant at Bechtle Steffen Schweiz Ag
We primarily use the solution for our branch offices.
View full review »The primary use case of this solution is for optimization, load balancing, and the different end links. We have a variety of customer enterprises that consist of small, medium, and large-size enterprise customers. More of our clients are moving to direct internet access, so we are getting rid of the current MPLS solutions.
View full review »AR
AndreasRuemmeli
Solution Architect at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
We primarily use the solution for two purposes. One is to connect the different locations, and the other is for security.
View full review »We primarily use it to provide SD-WAN solutions for our customers.
View full review »We did only a short evaluation focused in training to show the main functions of the dashboard and VPN implementation.
View full review »We are a reseller and Meraki SD-WAN is one of the products that I design and offer to my customers.
Meraki SD-WAN is used to connect office branches.
View full review »Meraki SD-WAN can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud.
I am using Meraki SD-WAN for small to medium-sized customers.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
Meraki SD-WAN
June 2025

Learn what your peers think about Meraki SD-WAN. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: June 2025.
861,390 professionals have used our research since 2012.