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.

Requirements Summary

The company is a known, trusted brand with a worldwide support structure. Based on fast-paced interviews with the CEO, CTO, and engineering staff, the primary business requirements were identified.

• The data infrastructure solution is required to be redundant and self-healing. Remote support by the internal IT team is necessary.
  
  
• Business unit requirements include:
  
  
  • New York headquarters and the primary sales staff don’t use standard fixed-line connections. When they are in the office, they are meeting with customers or showing products. Open seating and meeting rooms require wireless access. High-definition video conferencing is necessary for the meeting rooms, as well. Finance and Marketing functions are housed here and are located on different floors. Video analytics and monitoring would be highly beneficial for security purposes.
    
    
  • Manufacturing facilities are in the industrial district. There are only two manger offices and a lunchroom. The production lines require pervasive wireless access to support for manufacturing systems, video surveillances, and business application support.
    
    
  • Fabric buyers are in proximity to importers and shippers but remote to both the New York offices and manufacturing. These users are generally mobile and require a VPN solution that is easy to use and deploy.
    
    
  • Security between all business units must be easy to implement and monitor since competitors are always interested in leading fashion trends, and the company is successful and well-regarded.

Solution Design Planning and Presentation

A solution review meeting was scheduled, during which the team hoped to hear any concerns from the business units. The account team presented the proposed Cisco Meraki solution:

• The Cisco Meraki MS switches allow for wired connectivity of network devices, such as point-of-sale terminals.
  
  
• The MR series wireless access points meet all of the wireless networking requirements.
  
  
• The MX series firewalls provide for edge security and an easy-to-deploy SD-WAN solution.
  
  
• The Z series devices allow simple and flexible VPN connectivity for fabric buyers.
  
  
• Finally, the Meraki MV cameras provide an easy-to-deploy video monitoring solution that addresses all the customer needs.
  
  
• To address the customer’s needs around their lean IT staff, the entire solution is managed via the cloud-delivered Meraki dashboard.

During the customer presentation, several additional customer requirements were uncovered.

How can the proposed solution simplify deployment?

Easily: The Meraki equipment ships to a location unconfigured. Once plugged into the network and powered up, the new hardware will register to the Meraki cloud, and all configurations will be deployed remotely via the dashboard. This ensures no pre-configuration issues and no pre-staging issues with hardware.

How do we ensure redundancy of connectivity to each location?

No problem: The Meraki MX appliance AutoVPN feature allows for multiple encrypted tunnels to be created over any IP network, such as MPLS, Internet, or even 4G/LTE cellular services.

Can the video camera solution provide any of the benefits of traditional surveillance systems?

Yes. The wireless cameras can monitor keys areas of each location for monitoring and security, but they can also allow for additional services like people counting and motion heat maps. This allows the business to better understand what customers are looking at and what parts of a store people are frequenting. This gives a competitive edge by quickly identifying the areas of the store with the most customer interest.

How can I customize the solution?

The Meraki solution has an open and easily consumed API that allows you, the customer, to develop solutions as you see fit.

The bottom line: Retail organizations—like this fashion-focused business—are ideally suited for Meraki solutions.

This is a retail scenario and not customer-specific.

LEARN MORE ABOUT CISCO MERAKI

The “simplicity” and efficiency of Meraki introduces enormous benefits in terms of operations, allowing network staff to scale significantly more than with a traditional infrastructure. Contact your ConvergeOne National Account Manager or reach out to us below to have a discussion about what your business could look like with Meraki in it.