How to Control user laptop website access from open internet.

[Varun1]

Hello Guys,

Due to this Covide-19, we all are working from home.

Is there any way by which I can control my office user laptop network access  (URL access) on home wifi or open internet by which the user is connecting their laptop.

[kYutobi]

It would've had to of been installed on the laptops or if you can have them install the Cisco Umbrella client that integrates with Meraki you can do that. Not sure if it helps because they are already working from home.

[NGleich]

Hi Varun1,

Since your workers are already working from home i think there are not many ways how you can enforce such things.

When you do have access to those laptops you could enroll them in Systems Manager and at least force them to have Antivirus installed or such things.

Like kYotobi said Umbrella would be a suitable solution to your problem.

However you would need to buy Umbrella Subscriptions since Umbrella is not part of your Meraki licenses.
What Umbrella does is that it monitors your users DNS queries and checks them against a Talos (Ciscos Threat Response Team) database of malicious domains and checks the queries against policies and block-/allowlists created by you.

When you have an active Umbrella subscription you then could give your users the lightweight Umbrella client to install them on their laptops. Then every DNS query of those user laptops would be checked against Umbrella to see if it should be blocked or permitted.

Another (more simple solution in my eyes) would be that you tell your users to configure their laptops to use a VPN connection to your MX.

https://documentation.meraki.com/MX/Client_VPN/Client_VPN_Overview

Here's a documentation on that.

Since Meraki uses L2TP there is no additional software needed for that. You just have to trust your users to configure it that way.

I'm not quite sure if theres a way to force the laptops to use the VPN connection rather tham the "normal" internet connection.

Hope this helps

Kind Regards

Niklas

[Varun1]

Thank you for your reply!!!!

Actually I don't have that much capacity on my Meraki MX100 to support my WFH users.

I have asked Meraki Team, they just me to connect only 500 users approx at a time.

and I have more users than that.

So I check for umbrella Support.

Thanks for reply.