Manage Remote Networks

Tim Headicar, Technical Architects Team Leader at Chess, reviews how you can provide your people with secure remote access to your network using Cisco Meraki. 

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• Jump to How to Address these Challenges > 

• Jump to Why Meraki >

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A year ago, organisations had to enable remote working at very short notice. As a result, it was easy to concentrate on providing people access while losing sight of some aspects like keeping access to your networks safe, secure, simple and consistent. Many of our customers are now reviewing the decisions they made out of necessity to ensure that the networks they have come to rely on are secure and easy to manage.

Common Challenges

Simplicity

• How do you make access simple for people without creating an administrative burden for IT teams or compromising your organisation's security posture?
• How do you maintain a standard look, feel and access when working from home, in the office or on the road?
• How does your IT manage the environment easily and cohesively?
• How do you optimise employee experiences and productivity?

Security

• How do you protect against the elevated security threats that lurk on a home network?

Reliability

• Having to re-authenticate and re-present multi-factor authentication if the connection is lost.
• Complete loss of service, which can be problematic if this occurs for teams critical to the business.
• Issues with patching or updating company devices.
• Poor Performance of domestic Broadband
• Wifi issues masquerading as connectivity problems

How to address these challenges

Cloud managed networks have many benefits, including:

• Cost reductions
• Less burdensome for your IT Team with regular updates and underlying infrastructure managed by the supplier.
• Tend to be designed around remote working
• Securely and easily accessible from anywhere

Why Meraki

• Instantly auto-provision secure IPsec VPN tunnels between sites which automatically negotiate VPN routes, authentication and encryption protocols, and key exchange for all Meraki MX appliances in an organisation.
• Enable powerful security capabilities such as next-gen layer-7 firewall, Cisco Advanced Malware Protection (AMP), intrusion prevention, SSL decryption/inspection, data loss prevention (DLP).
• Control and monitor the flow of secure network traffic with easily configurable SD WAN.
• Seamlessly and securely provide remote office network access via Wi-Fi and over encrypted VPN tunnels.
• Bring sites and remote workers online faster than ever, with zero-touch provisioning, and the ability to quickly deploy secure segregated networks.
• Maintain service continuity with multiple WAN links and cellular backup.
• Quickly deploy virtual MX appliances (vMX) in private and all major public clouds.
• Cloud managed Wi-Fi providing zero-touch automatic provisioning and performance optimisation with no controller hardware or management software to install and maintain.
• Perform remote troubleshooting of employee connectivity and applications
• Gain insight with out-of-the-box application visibility and location analytics.
• Centrally provision, monitor and secure all organisation endpoint devices within your organisation with Meraki's cloud-based Systems Manager.
• Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) with Meraki Trusted Access enables personal devices to access critical resources without requiring MDM.
• Complete end-to-end network visibility when deploying the full cloud managed Meraki stack (Firewall/Switch/Wifi)

Our consultants can advise on the most appropriate solution for your needs and help connect your people. Contact our team through the form below or speak to your account manager directly.

Alternatively, join one of the 'Manage Remote Networks' sessions at our Chess Future Insight Technology Conference, where Steve Jarrett, Partner Managed Services at Cisco, and Stephen Dracup, COO at Chess, will cover how to work securely from anywhere.