Meraki: A Retail Organization Use Case

Imagine this scenario: A Brazilian new-age clothing designer is looking to open a New York office to complement their São Paulo, Brazil, headquarters. The company has a lean IT staff and little experience supporting multinational locations. Further, the CTO is looking for security, switching, and wireless infrastructure that can be managed via a centralized, cloud-delivered dashboard. Finally, given the vicious and competitive nature of high-end clothing design, the CTO would like a solution that can help maintain the physical security of their environment.

For many years, organizations have taken a traditional approach to buying expensive hardware and storing it in rows of racks in a data center located somewhere in the world. However, in 2006, Amazon launched a subsidiary called Amazon Web Services (AWS), which completely changed the future of IT Infrastructure. It began the transition away from the traditional approach of expensive data centers with high power and cooling, hands and feet, and all the hardware expense, to a cloud-based model where the cloud service provider has multiple data centers in a particular region that offer high availability (HA), with dedicated or non-dedicated servers, storage, networking, and many other services and features.

End-User Computing (EUC) refers to computer systems, platforms, and applications that are delivered via network connectivity (or internet) to an end user. EUC has been around for many years, with the customer usually having to buy expensive hardware like servers and storage to stand up the EUC environment.

Many vendors are pushing customers to move to subscription licensing models, so I thought it would be helpful to explore why subscription licensing is not only inevitable, but also very beneficial for everyone involved.

A lot of it has to do with adopting more of the benefits of cloud—without having to adopt a full cloud infrastructure or prepare for your migration to the cloud. Even the on-premises deployments of modern Unified Communications (UC) or Customer Experience (CX) solutions have already adopted many of the characteristics of cloud, as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology:

Organizations today have a multi-cloud presence. By that, I mean that on-premises data centers are no longer the standard in IT. Businesses require application mobility to meet the ever-increasing demand for data and information at light speeds, and thus it is very typical for an organization to have several deployments of multi-cloud data centers to fit these demands and needs. Software as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, Unified Communications as a Service, Edge, and IoT Computing are just a few of the potential multi-cloud deployments, on top of the on-premises and co-located data centers in different regions and geo-locations. 

The thought of migrating your entire business, with all its complexities, to the cloud, can feel daunting. However, the need to modernize has never been more urgent. In fact, it is estimated that 81% of companies with 1,000 employees or more have a multi-platform strategy. The number is expected to rise to more than 90% by 2024. Financially, worldwide spending on public cloud services is expected to grow to 73%, from $160B to $277B between 2018 and 2021. 

As most traditional network vendors are trying to build a cohesive solution through acquisition and integration, Cisco Meraki has had the integrated platform that other vendors are trying to create for quite some time. You owe it to yourself to take the time to get to know Meraki.

During this year of uncertainty and the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been many issues within schools, colleges, and universities globally on how to deliver student applications.

To no surprise COVID-19 has forced organizations to provide communication solutions and offerings that address today’s challenges and ensure resilience. While many companies know that this is a need more than ever, migrating IT workloads can seem cost prohibitive due to the time and challenges most organizations face when trying to do all the work internally.

Challenges can compound when the migration includes mission-critical data, infrastructure and moving to the cloud. Since there is no single method for all sizes and types of cloud migration, you can significantly bolster your chances of cloud security success by leveraging best practices, well-executed plans, and partners with experience.

Steve Brock, Avaya OneCloud Marketing Leader, recently wrote a great article about the four new mindsets Avaya has noted that have enabled customers to maintain and even increase their workforce productivity during these challenging times.

One way to overcome a lot of the previously mentioned challenges and concerns with storing such large amounts of unstructured data is to move it to a public cloud provider. As for the previously discussed challenges of legacy NAS filers, most of those concerns would no longer be applicable. Essentially, you would be paying the cloud provider to worry about all the infrastructure concerns like capacity, performance, uptime, H/W support, and so on.