Hello all! My name is Rachel, and I'm the Systems Administrator at the Florida Dental Association. We made a big switch to Meraki when we moved to a new headquarters in 2017, and it's been the best investment we made for the new building.
Our association has approximately 8000 member dentists, but my job is to support our staff. We have about 50 employees, most of which are at the new headquarters, some are at the governmental affairs office downtown, and a couple insurance sales agents across the state. We're a 2 person IT staff- me and my boss.
Prior to the move, we had no visibility into our network. None. Our ISP installed the equipment (all Cisco of course- ASA, aironets, etc), and if we had an issue, an engineer from our ISP had to handle it. It was the wild west, so our top priority for the new building was visibility, and we got that.
Oh, and we had 48 hours to move everything from the old building to the new one and be back in business. No pressure!
With the Meraki Dashboard, we were able to have everything configured in advance so when we arrived, it was plug and play. Since then, we've made a couple tweaks, but for the most part we haven't had to fix any major issues. It's been smooth sailing, and now I can see EVERYTHING on the network from anywhere.
Here's what we used:
- 1 MX100 firewall
- 3 MS250 switches
- 9 MR33 access points
- 1 MX65W (for site-to-site VPN between the new HQ and our downtown office)
Our new network has made it easier for me to troubleshoot issues, see our bandwidth usage, and keep all equipment up to date and secure (I never updated the firmware for our old network- who knows how long it had been?). We made a great investment, and I know we made the right choice going with Meraki.
