Cisco Meraki, Cisco's cloud-managed IT platform, announced the launch of Meraki Go on Wednesday, which includes network switches and a security gateway.
Meraki Go was designed to help small- and medium-sized business that don't have large IT teams tap into more advanced networking solutions. In addition to the network switches and security gateway, Meraki Go also includes an optional security subscription that's provisioned through Cisco's Umbrella security technology as well as WiFi access points.
The Meraki Go hardware can be managed from a mobile application, which Cisco said makes it deployable in less than 10 minutes without prior IT experience. Meraki Go's entire product suite was designed to be DIY (do it yourself) with built-in, step-by-step instructions for getting started.
Should customers encounter a problem, a technical support team can be contacted via the app. Since Meraki Go is cloud-based, businesses that use it are protected from vulnerabilities with automatic updates when needed. Access to the Meraki Go app and technical support are provided at no additional cost.
"The internet has become as critical as having water and electricity, costing businesses dearly in lost sales and customers if it's slow or loses connectivity," said Meraki Go's Lee Peterson, product manager, in a statement. "Every investment a business makes needs to work harder and do more, and Meraki Go provides high performance business networking, plus visibility, control, insights, and analytics that allow owners to make business decisions confidently."
Peterson said that Meraki Go delivers enterprise-grade hardware that's provisioned by the cloud and can include optional cyber threat protection backed by Cisco, which are some of the same technologies that Fortune 500 companies use.
During this week's Cisco Partner Summit 2019, Cisco Meraki also rolled out a software feature called Adaptive Policy that allows organizations to group users, applications and devices in order to apply the uniform policies. Adaptive Policy is part of Cisco's Zero Trust Security initiative, and it also enables multi-domain policy support between Meraki and a software-defined access fabric deployment.
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Cisco also announced a new wireless Meraki gateway for cellular connectivity through simple provisioning and management. Also on the hardware side, Cisco Meraki announced a new access switch, MS390, that combines the Meraki software with Cisco's Catalyst line of campus hardware. Ever since their introduction a few years ago, Cisco's Catalyst 9000 series switches have been the fastest growing product in the company's history