Our organization in New Mexico stretches across and to some extremely rural areas. In a lot of places we we don't have the availability of any kind of infrastructural circuit such as copper or fiber and have to resort to mobile devices and 3G or 4G (if we're lucky) type connections. We also have a few "mobile" clinics that operate out of treatment van/RVs that travel around the state. We once had an incident in which our mobile health van was stalled out in a remote area in the middle of treatment and was unable to phone home and the patient was unable to receive proper paperwork for a necessary prescription. The van became unreachable from their mobile hotspot and we were unable to remotely troubleshoot any of the issues from our central office 400 miles away. By pure luck the van happened to be within 50 miles of a site that offered similar services and used similar equipment. We called over to the site who just happened to have a warm spare MX65 that wasn't currently in active use as well as a cradlepoint appliance we had coincidentally lent them a few months prior. We had access to the cradlepoint device via it's mobile dashboard and were able to give their onsite tech configuration information for their Meraki in order to establish a s2s non-meraki VPN peer. The cradlepoint was plugged into a power converter in the driver's car and being configured for our use live as he was driving it to the van. Once the driver arrived we were able to power up the cradlepoint and plug in the Meraki. Thankfully because of the ease of use on the Meraki dashboard, we were able to set up all of the s2s Non-Meraki VPN peer settings prior to his arrival and light it up as soon as he was able to plug it in. Within 15 minutes we had an active connection restored and network resources available for the van until it was able to be returned and repaired. The MX device and dashboard easily saved us from what could have turned out to be a very unpleasant situation for patient and provider alike. From then one we keep a spare cradlepoint and MX device ready to deploy at all times for exactly this kind of situation.
