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Meraki is famously easy to run — right up until the to-do list grows faster than your team. Firmware, changes, security events and new sites all compete for the same few people. In this blog, we'll look at how Meraki managed services take that routine load off your team, tighten security and keep performance on track, and how support hours scale with your business.
Streamlined Operations: Where Does the Time Go?
Most of the time in a Meraki estate goes on routine work: configuration changes, firmware, monitoring and chasing alerts. A managed service hands that work to engineers who do it every day, through a defined process, so your own team gets its hours back for the projects that move the business forward.
The Meraki dashboard makes each individual task quick. The catch is that someone still has to do it, check it and record it — and in a lean IT team, that someone is usually also running a project, a help desk queue and a vendor renewal.
With our managed services, that work runs through our service desk and change management. Firmware is validated in our lab before it reaches production. Changes are logged and scheduled. Alerts are raised when your network moves away from its normal baseline, so faults are found early rather than reported by users.
The efficiency gain isn't only speed. It's consistency: the same process every time, whoever is on shift, with a record you can look back on.
Meraki Security: Protection in Layers
Meraki MX appliances bring next-generation firewall features to every site, including Layer 7 firewall rules, intrusion detection and prevention, content filtering and malware protection. Managing them well means keeping policy consistent across sites, watching security events and acting on them quickly — which is where a managed service earns its keep.
Under our Meraki Security and SD-WAN service, Meraki security events are raised in our service desk, then triaged and remediated by our engineers. The Advanced tier adds security incident triage and response, and the Critical tier adds Layer 7 firewall as a service, content filtering and advanced threat protection.
The firewall is one layer. Many customers add cloud-delivered security on top, such as Cisco Umbrella for DNS-layer protection or Cisco Secure Connect for Meraki, through our Security Service Edge service. That's security in depth: the same policy whether a user is in the office or working from home.
Full-Stack Meraki: One Provider for Every Layer
Full-stack support means one team looks after every Meraki layer you run: switching, Wi-Fi, security appliances and SD-WAN. Instead of splitting responsibility between providers, you choose the service domains you need and we scope them in one agreement, with one service desk and one set of reports.
In practice, Meraki sits across two of our nine service domains. Meraki Access covers MS switches, MR access points and MX appliances running in single-WAN mode. Meraki Security and SD-WAN covers MX and vMX appliances running multi-WAN, full SD-WAN or advanced firewall services.
Not everything in your network is Meraki? That's common. Catalyst switching, Cisco ISE and even non-Cisco devices can sit under the same agreement.
Just as important is who does the work. Our managed services team is the same engineering team that designs and deploys Meraki networks, so the people supporting yours understand why it was built the way it was.
Network Performance: Keeping Meraki Fit for Purpose
Performance management means watching how the network is used, spotting trends early and acting before users feel them. We combine Meraki's built-in analytics with Highlight, our monitoring platform, so device health, performance and open incidents sit in one live dashboard that both your team and ours can see.
From the Advanced tier, the Meraki Access service adds LAN and wireless analytics and reporting, showing how clients, applications and devices use the network. Usage trends at network, client, application and port level are available in the customer portal.
That data feeds your regular service review — quarterly or monthly, depending on your tier — covering performance, incidents, changes, capacity and your technology roadmap. It's where a congested site, an ageing switch or a licence renewal gets planned rather than discovered.
Pro-Tip: Before you hand a Meraki estate to any provider, tidy up the dashboard: consistent network and device names, tags for site type, and accurate street addresses. Alerts, reports and service reviews all read better when a device name tells you exactly where it is.
Support Hours: Which Tier Fits Your Business?
Support hours depend on the service tier you choose. Essential covers business hours, Advanced extends cover to extended business hours, and Critical provides 24x7x365 support for mission-critical environments. Each tier builds on the one before it, so you can step up as your scale or risk profile changes.
Enablement sits underneath for teams that run their own operations. It covers licence and feature adoption, training and lifecycle planning, without monitoring or incident response.
For Meraki Access, Critical adds 24x7x365 support for P1 incidents, application visibility with NetFlow or NBAR, and ThousandEyes path monitoring. It's the right fit where an outage in the middle of the night costs real money, such as a distribution centre or a round-the-clock operation.
Whatever the tier, you log and track requests through one customer portal, where planned changes, maintenance windows, reports and root-cause analyses also live. And because each tier builds on the last, moving up is a change of scope, not a change of provider.
Meraki Managed Services: FAQs
What Do Meraki Managed Services Cover?
They cover the day-to-day running of your Meraki network: configuration, monitoring, firmware, changes and incident response. At IPTel this spans two service domains: Meraki Access for switching, Wi-Fi and single-WAN MX, and Meraki Security and SD-WAN for firewall and SD-WAN.
Is 24x7 Support Included?
Only on the Critical tier, which provides 24x7x365 cover. Essential runs in business hours and Advanced in extended business hours. For Meraki Access, Critical's around-the-clock cover applies to P1 incidents.
Can You Manage Meraki Alongside Our Other Equipment?
Yes. Pick the service domains you need, such as Cisco Campus Access, Cisco ISE or Non-Cisco Devices, and we scope them in one agreement with one service desk.
How Do We Choose the Right Tier?
Start with how critical the network is and when it needs cover. Our free 10-minute Build Your Business Case assessment recommends a service tier and shows the value at stake for your network.
Meraki Managed Services: Summary
Meraki makes networks simpler to run, but someone still has to run them. A managed service takes the routine work, security triage and performance tracking off your team, delivered through a consistent process by engineers who know Meraki inside out. Choose the domains and the hours you need, keep full administrative access to your own environment, and spend your team's time on the work that grows the business.
Need Help With Meraki Managed Services?
If you'd like to see what a managed Meraki service would look like for your sites, start with our free 10-minute Build Your Business Case assessment — it recommends a service tier and shows the value at stake. You can also read more about managed Meraki Access and Meraki Security and SD-WAN, make an enquiry, or drop us a line at sales@iptel.com.au.