The Meraki team has a north star we’re always aiming toward: simplifying the IT experience. These words make a great tagline, and indeed they are the essence of our mission statement. Putting this mantra into practice is easier said than done in the tech world, where new features are constantly vying for attention. The reality is a continual tension between feature richness and simplicity, a line we walk every day at Meraki.

Our Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) solution, Systems Manager, provides IT administrators with rich and powerful control over the managed devices entering their environment – be they organization-owned or employee-owned. The many operating systems covered by this solution are continually evolving and adding new features themselves, so inevitably the number of levers and knobs available in Systems Manager to control them all also grows.

The good news is that while IT departments may need all these controls at their fingertips, this isn’t true of all Systems Manager users. A classroom teacher, for example, may only need a subset of tools, enabling control over the devices in use within their own class. If a simpler tool could be provided, focused on the essentials for device and app management, this could reduce the number of calls to IT.

Enter Systems Manager Self Service Portal. Let’s call it the SSP.

The SSP is perfect for two groups of users: those looking for a clean, simple interface through which to manage the essentials for a small number of devices, and the end users of those devices themselves. Starting with the former, the SSP prioritizes efficiency with a thoughtfully designed, streamlined interface.

Here we can see the tools our customers tell us they use most frequently, both for managing the devices themselves, and the apps they are running.

End users of managed devices can also benefit from the SSP by using the portal to install apps when permitted to do so. In addition, end users can use the tool to see what their IT administrators are able to do with, and see on, the device they’re using. This provides greater confidence and transparency over whatever data or information they access or share through the devices they’re using.

We believe Meraki is more than just a product, it’s an experience, and the best way to get a feel for the new interface is to take it for a test drive. For more details, and to set the SSP up, take a look at the dedicated documentation page. As ever, we love to hear our customers’ feedback, so please let us know your thoughts on the new tool, either on twitter or in the new Meraki Community.

2017 has been a challenging year in the world of IT, with a number of high-profile incidents making headlines all around the globe. At Meraki we’ve also discovered issues of our own and made progress in eliminating vulnerabilities, helping to protect our customers’ valuable data. We take this kind of work very personally, and consider it a journey, never a destination.

No IT administrator wakes up wanting to hear about issues like these, especially if they create more work to mitigate, but no doubt all IT admins would reluctantly concede these issues are a fact of life that we will all continue to face from time to time. On the rare occasion we at Meraki do need to communicate about an issue, especially when an action is required, we are able to inform not only through email, but also through the dashboard itself, to any Meraki customer who is potentially impacted.

Thanks to the Meraki model, it’s often the case that we only need to inform because we’ve already patched systems before a vulnerability becomes common knowledge. This was the case with several ransomware attacks we’ve seen this year. Thanks to the integration of Cisco Talos intelligence into the Meraki MX, customers with the Advanced Security license are proactively protected against malicious actors through world-class intrusion and malware detection. In other cases, like the recently uncovered KRACK Wi-Fi vulnerability, firmware which addressed the issue was prepared ahead of public disclosure, meaning we merely needed to inform customers and prompt them to upgrade, where necessary.

Whether to require action, or simply to inform, we want to ensure we are communicating as transparently as possible in a way that is easy to keep track of. To this end, today we are introducing the new Cisco Meraki Customer Advisories page. This page will act as a chronological repository of issues that have the potential to impact Meraki customers, regardless of whether it’s an industry-wide issue or one relating to Meraki technology.

The Meraki team will continue to draw attention to high-priority issues through the channels we’ve always used, so think of this as a supplemental reference which will serve as a record of significant issues that have come to our attention. Through this tool we hope to further raise our chances of reaching and informing every Meraki customer.

We may not be able to wave a magic wand and prevent future vulnerabilities or issues, but we remain ever vigilant and will always do our utmost to communicate transparently. Please take a look at the Advisories page and let us know what you think in the Meraki Community.

Not a day goes by in the world of IT without mention of “the cloud,” in one context or another. Public and private cloud-based services continue to transform the IT industry at a rapid pace, in parallel with the demand for better ways to manage IT infrastructures.

Public cloud solutions provide an option for IT administrators looking to reduce the amount of physical hardware they need to support by running services in a virtual environment. Another ubiquitous form of cloud service is mass public data storage, something which touches the lives of almost everyone connected to the Internet, whether they know it or not. Applications we use every day, like Netflix, Expedia, Spotify and Geico use data storage services provided by one of the cloud storage specialists. These services are attractive to fast-moving tech innovators who get to focus on what they do best without having to build their own huge storage infrastructure to support the data their apps use.

Meraki itself works with cloud hosting providers, and we understand how valuable these services can be to our customers first-hand. Back in May we announced a new software solution we call Virtual MX (or vMX) that enables Meraki customers to conveniently connect directly to a virtual MX instance within Amazon Web Services (AWS) using Meraki Auto VPN. This eliminates the tedious manual configuration associated with regular third party services or VPN peers. Once the VPN is up, Meraki SD-WAN technology ensures dependable, robust connectivity to essential services.

It’s always a good sign when the moment a cool solution is announced for one use case, you’re immediately bombarded with questions about when it will be available for other similar services, and that’s precisely what we experienced with vMX for AWS.

The service everyone wanted to know about? Microsoft Azure.

Azure is one of the largest players in cloud services, so we are excited to announce global availability of Azure Managed Application support for vMX. Customers can now order vMX (VMX100), specifying either AWS or Azure, that will operate as a one-armed VPN concentrator within its host cloud, providing easy access to hosted IT services.

Detailed setup instructions are available on our documentation site, and customers keen to try either service can now request a trial by reaching out to their Meraki contact.

To learn more about the full capabilities of the MX, sign up for one of our webinars or request some trial gear. We’d love to get the product into your hands and please don’t be shy about letting us know which service we should be connecting Auto VPN to next!