(I didn't mean to write a book, it just kinda happened... Feel free to skip to the last paragraph if you want to know how it turned out for me)   I would say the company I work for is a small to mid sized business. We have about 275 employees in a small town in North-Central Texas. When I first started working for Air Tractor (shameless plug), we had a single aDSL connection coming into an office on the opposite side of our single campus from our "Server Room" where our core switch was located. This pitiful setup and connection was supporting around 90 workstations internally and a guest wireless network. I'll never forget those first few weeks... I was hardly surprised to hear complaints about internet speeds or synchronization issues with email. It was easy to understand why we were having intermittent internet "outages" when the CPU on our undersized firewall would max out due to poorly setup content filtering while trying to handle throughput and client vpn routing. Seeing the rats nest of cables surrounding the switch rack in that tiny, hot, server room...no wonder everyone was afraid to touch anything. None of this surprised me.    I spent more time those first few weeks observing. Listening. Not simply to hardware or configurations. No. Listening to the employees. Listening to the workers on our production floor that are used to these issues and seeing that they never brought them up because they've become the norm. Listening to office staff and understanding their simple requests that have only gone unnoticed. Still, nothing was surprising as I learned. I had walked into a previously non-existent position created out of necessity and everything uncovered from my users was absolutely expected.    It wasn't until I had a real chance to sit down with the faces I recognized from my interview that I was pleasantly surprised. I say "pleasantly" because it was refreshing. Refreshing in a sense that they realized the potential threat of the outside world and how it could jeopardize everything they had worked so hard to build and protect over the years. Refreshing that it instilled in me a deeper respect for everyone I had met and listened to the past few weeks. Refreshing that I really had a potential to grow into my position and know that I would be looked upon as more than just a desktop support technician. Refreshing...and absolutely terrifying. (I'm sure glad they saw a confidence I didn't know I had yet)   The following months I grew a little more comfortable with my daunting, originally unrealized role as I dove into creating a game plan for how we could both update our network AND focus more easily on security. With little background on hardware and solution procurement...wow. There were probably 10 times as many options as I had ever imagined there would be when it comes to firewalls. WHO KNEW? (well, at the least, I didn't know) But there was one conversation I had with a former colleague that changed the game. How she was getting by with minimal IT resources with a network I imagined was 3 times my size. There was a brand mentioned that I had never heard before. Meraki How could Cisco have another player in the ring that I had never heard of? I don't know how or why it came up, but I'm very grateful for that quick conversation in passing.    So enough about beginnings and the sentiments of green IT guy...now we fast forward a few years. If you have somehow managed to make it through my ramblings thus far, I congratulate you and say "Thanks!" Secondly, if you're not using a Meraki MX device with the Advanced Security license...well, then, I'm sorry. Also, go get one. Right Now. Just click right here and get one. It was the best decision I ever made, maybe it can be the same for you.    As an all-in-one person IT department, I find myself too often needing to be a little...creative with my time-management. On the fly access to Meraki's Security Center is perfect for my intensely varying days in and out of the office. At a glance, I can see which systems at which site are being hit the most, and literally where in the world it's coming from. From a compliance standpoint, I can block an entire country's traffic from reaching my network in just a few clicks. The use of Bright Cloud's updated category listing for content filtering helps keep my users off of malicious sites. I consider our MX 100 as my hardest working employee. Whether I'm busy at work, or I'm sleeping at home, or on vacation with no signal in the mountains...the Master Chief (as I have named him, any Halo fans?) is hard at work. While I'm always on call, he's always on duty. I take pride in the fact that I have the leader of network security (Cisco) backing my departments employee of the month (going on 2 years straight, I doubt I'll ever claim that title at this rate). The Cisco AMP (Advanced Malware Protection) integration alerts me and lets me know if something may have slipped through. The retrospective aspect of this has greatly improved incident response time (and my confidence in our other security layers when I see it's caught by another means). This single appliance has helped mold our companies culture around security and has helped me create a better security posture out of one that simply was not there before.   ... View more