The CISCO™ Meraki home page says it best, “CISCO™ Meraki creates powerful cloud-managed IT solutions, helping organizations save time and money with technology that simply works.” United Solutions Company (USC) began a proof of concept for the Meraki devices back in 2014, only two years after CISCO™ purchased it. Now, USC is collaborating with CISCO™ Meraki for our credit unions.
As of today, USC Networking has Meraki Systems Manager for Device Management, Meraki firewalls (MX), Telecommuter firewalls, Meraki Wireless Access Points (MR), and Meraki Switches (MS). USC is leveraging CISCO™ Meraki to streamline and secure new sites, either offices or credit union branches. USC Networking is leveraging the built in Auto-VPN & SD-WAN capability to eliminate dependency of a single telecommunications provider while still providing redundancy with dual WAN interfaces and encryption over all WAN interfaces.
Our Service Provider solution allows a credit union to have CISCO™ Meraki firewalls at their locations with VPN's configured from each site at USC. For many clients, USC recommends private MPLS circuits with Century Link that are provided by USC allowing the credit union to purchase a backup Internet connection with the provider of their choice. USC Networking would install a CISCO™ Meraki Firewall to provide auto-VPN connections and SD-WAN allowing a credit union to leverage both connections simultaneously and maintain data encryption, with dual WAN uplinks. With the Meraki firewall, we can add secure WIFI for the credit union team and segmentation for a "guest" network to be used by members, vendors, etc.
With this solution, networking audits are taken off the credit union’s shoulders. For a credit union’s firewall management, most examiners expect the credit union to have rule sets annotated with comments indicating the business purpose for the specific rules. The credit union is to review each rule set periodically to ensure they are appropriate for the credit union business needs. With Meraki provided by USC, the firewall is owned and operated by USC and provided to the credit union at a monthly subscription per device. Now the ports, rule reconciliation, and vendor due diligence are covered by United Solutions data centers, USC’s policy and procedure, and our SOC 1 Type II (SSAE-18).
Utilizing the Meraki Cloud Based Dashboard, USC is able to provide self-service network topology and reporting to each client in our service. Meraki Dashboard Management allows a credit union to control thousands of devices in a secure, browser-based interface, with the ability to onboard new devices and automate application of security policies. Bringing your own device has never been so easy.
As the Meraki platform grows, so will the scale of deployment at USC. Just as the Meraki home page says, “Work simple.” Let your credit union work simple with USC Meraki Deployment.
