For years, ubiquitous connectivity and network security have been top of mind for our customers. E-payments, digital health and school records, digital loyalty programs and app user engagement have made secure and reliable connectivity mission critical for a huge percentage of Meraki customers around the world. If your local sandwich shop can’t accept a payment without a secure internet link, all of a sudden hungry lunch-goers everywhere feel the pain of even the shortest outage.

In order to maintain constant, ubiquitous connectivity, Wireless WAN (using cellular data for backhaul) is no longer a niche part of routing… business critical networks can use Wireless WAN for day zero connectivity, for high availability and for some as their primary WAN. That’s why we’ve launched the Meraki Cellular Gateway (MG), an IP67 rated cellular gateway with the simplicity of the Meraki platform. The MG can be paired with any Meraki MX, Cisco ISR / vEdge device, or any third party router to seamlessly deliver LTE connectivity… This is exactly what our customers are asking for, and I believe this will be our fastest launching product line ever.

Moving onto security, there was a time when implementing a robust firewall was considered sufficient to protect networks, devices and users. Those days are long gone now. At Meraki we take a thoughtful approach to network security, with a wide range of tools to protect users and applications without complicating the networks we’re trying to protect. Now I’m proud to share a significant expansion of our security offering that broadens protection for IT, for users and for devices.

It’s crucial to everyone’s security posture that we segment the network, controlling access to critical resources, while limiting the scope of a potential breach. To address this, we’re introducing Adaptive Policy, supported on our new and smartest switch ever, the MS390. With this feature IT teams can create and deploy advanced policies based on groups of users or devices without complicating the network. I believe this development will allow us to increase security in the network while simultaneously simplifying networks… I can’t tell you how powerful this is going to be.

We’re also adopting Cisco Trustworthy Systems, enabling us to ensure that the firmware running on Meraki devices is authentic, unmodified, and operating as intended. A related new feature, SecurePort, enables a Meraki switch to recognize and authorize an AP as it’s connected, automatically deploying the correct security profiles.

Finally, our Systems Manager Team is releasing Trusted Access. Imagine truly secure BYOD, a means for devices to connect to a network without the need for a shared password or an installed device management profile. With Meraki Trusted Access there’s no more need to carry two phones, or go through the hassle of installing new profiles every time you change location.

This is a huge launch for us on the Meraki team, and really too much for me to do justice to in one blog post, so stay tuned for more on these powerful new features. As always, you’ll find plenty more detail on our website, and we can’t wait to get these capabilities into the hands of our customers. With these announcements I truly believe we can make security simpler, and networks more powerful.