Cisco Meraki SD-WAN is a cloud-managed solution that simplifies and secures wide area networking across branch, campus, and remote locations. Built on Meraki’s dashboard, it delivers centralized visibility, automation, and traffic optimization without the complexity of traditional WAN deployments. The solution improves application performance by dynamically routing traffic based on real-time conditions, integrating advanced security, and providing seamless multicloud connectivity. With support…
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Lumen SD-WAN Solutions
Score 6.3 out of 10
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Lumen SD-WAN Solutions (formerly CenturyLink® SD-WAN) with hybrid connectivity is a WAN solution supporting scalable networks across a range of connectivity types. They integrate disparate connectivity types into seamless hybrid software-defined WAN.Gain complete visibility through a centralized customer portal. Branches can get out to the internet/cloud directly without hairpinning through a central HQ, improving performance. Lumen SD-WAN helps improve application performance, like application…
At our level, we had to optimize our 3 internet links (MPLS and LTE) with applications like O365, SAP, Microsoft CRM Dynamics and our collaborative work tools like Teams. We also had to ensure that both client workstations and servers could communicate with minimal latency with our Microsoft Intune infrastructure.
Although it is one of the most highly trusted and highly reliable high-speed internet connections, there are times when CenturyLink SD-WAN Solutions had unexpected outages which ran longer than normal causing service degradation. That should be looked at.
AutoVPN sites to site firewall rules needs to be improved
there is no logging or any insights which would be able to tell you what are the hit counts or actual usage for site to site firewall rules
SD-WAN plus license includes Smart breakout which has only few applications and those do not work properly, so it is quite useless
VPN exclusions (local internet breakout) for TCP/UDP type of traffic can not be specified with port ranges
VPN exclusions (local internet breakout) can be defined only for destinations, but not the sources. It is policy based routing which should support also Source definition
We implemented Meraki in most of our organization sites, so we are always looking for ways of improving its usage, add more features and discover characteristics that we do not know we already have. As it is an easy to use tool and we are growing, hiring new employees, it is really simple to onboard the new joiners.
Fast and efficient. The only issue currently is that the support is only overseas support and not in South Africa, which causes delays in resolution for some cases. Escalating issues is quite simple and the opening of new cases from the dashboard is easy. I have never had a support issue that could not be resolved.
We did a very stringent valuation a few years ago. And we evaluated probably about a dozen suppliers on paper that we evaluate just by capabilities. And, we of some other business criteria, and we whittled that down to a list of five. And out of those five, we brought four of those into our lab environment where we ran approximately 350 different test cases on, we really beat on it pretty heavily. And some of those other suppliers would've been companies like Fortinet Versa Networks Silver Peak, which is now owned by Hewlett Packard.
It was my company's decision though on selecting to use Century Link SD-WAN Solutions. However it was very faster in the European region when compared to other products.
Being a cloud-first solution, Meraki Dashboard will scale as needed without any effort for the client. The Meraki cloud will provision (upscale and downscale) the resources as you grow or shrink in size. You only have to physically install the MX on your site, all the management is one through the Internet via Meraki Dashboard. Worth noting that you can fully-configure the MX prior to the physical installation on site.
It was mostly around logs. I mean I understand because the aim is to provide the simplified solution to the people as an end user, be it an IT manager or the oil team. So I understand where you don't have lots of tools assigned where you can actually take help from the track. But in terms of having that logging information, I think that's where it's been a bit of a kind of journey where struggling, we have been struggling there.
