Meraki MDM vs AirWatch

[MerakiJockey505]

Our organization uses Meraki almost exclusively throughout our sites. We have a large network consisting of providers, telecommute workers, executive, administrative, customer support and IT staff.  A large number of our employees are given company mobile devices and the others usually have their own personal devices that occasionally connect to the network.  In a few small groups AirWatch has been used in the past to deploy applications and company Internet use policies.  The infrastructure team and I are in the process of pitching Meraki MDM in order to do the same as well as launch a BYOD campaign for personal mobile use on our network.  Does anyone have any suggestions for pitching and launching this kind of campaign?  Also does anyone have any advice or "testimonial" they can offer towards MDM over AirWatch?

[MRCUR]

We use Meraki's MDM (or EMM as the new buzzword goes) primarily for iOS management and also a bit on macOS now. For iOS I think Meraki is right up there with others like AirWatch, Jamf, etc. For Mac... not so much. When you are using the full stack, using SM just adds even more info which is really nice (like seeing policy compliance on the client page of an MR network). 

A lot of what SM can or can't do well comes down to what your org wants to do with it. But in general, at least for iOS, Meraki is extremely good about having day zero support for new Apple MDM features. 

[MerakiJockey505]

Thanks @MRCUR for the great information to consider.  Do you use any version of Android at your organization?

[MRCUR]

@MerakiJockey505 We don't deploy Android at this point, but my impression of SM is that it supports Android MDM quite well. Mobile OS' certainly seems to be Meraki's focus. 

[kYutobi]

We use Meraki MDM at our school. I've been with Meraki since before it was bought by Cisco and hands down has been great for managing the iPads. Easy app deployments (even easier with VPP), policy management can be made a breeze, and tags works wonders. We use geo-fencing so that the iPad alerts us if it leaves a perimeter, different apps per grade, even DEP (Device Enrollment Program) makes it easy to enroll and supervise. If you like simplicity continue Meraki.

[DCBOE-Admin]

kYutobi,

How well does the Meraki Geofencing works when the iOS device is just Wi-Fi?  If the units are in a charging unit and goes to sleep, if the units are removed and brought up outside of the fencing how accurate is the geotag once it connects to the public internet?

It's my understanding that iPads with Wi-Fi only is not that reliable as iPads with cellular when it comes to geofencing, is this true?

Thank you for any information you or someone else can provide.

--DCBOE-Admin

[kenco8801]

Hi @kYutobi

Have you tried setting up geo-fencing rules in bulk, eg for multiple devices for multiple locations?

We have a lots of locations, each with iPads for that particular location but I don't want to have to go through each device per location and allocate the settings

[Jason_G]

@kenco8801 Geofencing policies work off the same tagging system as settings, so a "Corporate Office" tag can be used to allocate both device restrictions and a geofencing policy to a device or devices. From what I've done, a single geofencing policy can only encompass one location and radius, but multiple geofencing policies can be applied to one or multiple devices. One thing to keep in mind is that while a device's location on its details page may update via IP-based locations, the value used in determining geofencing compliance will not.

@DCBOE-Admin Without a cellular connection, you can only get updates to a device's location while it's connected to a wifi network. If it connects to a network and gets back to Meraki's server, public network or not, geofencing location data will be updated and any compliance policy based on location will go into effect. The problem is the compliance policy can only go into effect after the geofence is technically violated (i.e., outside the location for longer than the grace period) and after the device is able to get its location data back to the Meraki servers. It won't assume anything or give a kind of "time bomb" effect. You'll have to keep the same thing in mind as above as well: location data from IP-based locations is not taken into account when determining geofence compliance status.

[Mr_IT_Guy]

One of our SysAdmins spent about 2-3 running Meraki MDM against AirWatch and other vendors. I'm not in the office today, but I'll shoot him and email and get his thoughts on it.

[MerakiJockey505]

@Mr_IT_GuyThanks, that would be awesome!

[Mr_IT_Guy]

@MerakiJockey505 According to my SysAdmin, Meraki's MDM solution meets the requirement for a MDM solution. AirWatch, however, had much more robust advanced features and he preferred that interface over Meraki. The problem, as with most things, was cost. It was SIGNIFICANTLY more expansive than the Meraki solution.

[MRCUR]

@Mr_IT_Guy I absolutely agree that AirWatch is a much more advanced MDM platform than SM, but as you see it comes at a (large) cost. But if you want to do serious Mac MDM based management, AirWatch is a great path to go down. 

[Stealth_Network]

We have used SM, Airwatch. MobileIron, Xen_Mobile, MAS360 ; Meraki is a good MDM product and the advantages are cost, single pane of glass and ease of use. Where the more feature rich EMM's come in is integration, features and functionality for large enterprises. This also differs if you are looking at cloud versus on-prem.

We are a MobileIron vendor/integrator but it depends on client requirements, for small clients, or ones with leaner IT SM is a great choice. If rich features, integrations and application tunneling capabilities we recommend MobileIron.

It really comes down to do you just need an MDM product or do you need an EMM product?

[AsifAppleBah]

Hi,

Could you pls. share SM vs Airwatch ? or any link

Thank you

---

@Stealth_Network wrote:

We have used SM, Airwatch. MobileIron, Xen_Mobile, MAS360 ; Meraki is a good MDM product and the advantages are cost, single pane of glass and ease of use. Where the more feature rich EMM's come in is integration, features and functionality for large enterprises. This also differs if you are looking at cloud versus on-prem.

We are a MobileIron vendor/integrator but it depends on client requirements, for small clients, or ones with leaner IT SM is a great choice. If rich features, integrations and application tunneling capabilities we recommend MobileIron.

It really comes down to do you just need an MDM product or do you need an EMM product?

---

[BlakeRichardson]

@MerakiJockey505 It really depends what is determined to be the best tool for the job, we use Meraki for iOS devices BUT we use JAMF for MacOS devices simply because we had issues with the Meraki agent that weren't able to be fixed. 

My advice would be to make sure Meraki will support the devices you are wanting to migrate and that the decision isn't being made just because it would be nice to have all the eggs in one basket.

Good luck and hope it all goes well!