Clarity Consulting has been providing custom application development, experiential design, and groundbreaking software products to customers around the world for over 20 years. With offices in Chicago, Seattle, and Croatia, along with a handful of remote developers throughout the US and Canada, Clarity Consulting needs reliable hardware to support the remote staff as well as the growing customer support team. The company remains dedicated to maintaining their exceptional level of service and the reliability of the Meraki solution helps them do just that.

Original networking challenges

• No dedicated IT team, 2 staff members spend a couple hours a week overseeing the entire network infrastructure
• Previous network devices required complex CLI configurations and lacked proactive alerts and detailed traffic analytics to identify and resolve issues
• Employees in Croatia and other remote locations experienced weak connectivity, making it difficult to share files and join video calls
• Lack of a holistic line of hardware, including wireless, switching, and security devices, to support both in-office and remote worker networks
• Only one person had knowledge of the ins and outs of the network configuration and when problems arose, very little could be done in-house to resolve issues

Why Cisco Meraki

• Lean IT staff can glance at the high-level network health and drill into potential issues with the intuitive Meraki dashboard
• Complete line of hardware met needs of internal gateway and remote worker capabilities, as no other vendor assessed offered an equally exhaustive family of products
• Overall experience with and responsiveness of the Meraki support team provided increased confidence to deploy

The deployment

• After successful product evaluations and purchases, Meraki access points were set up in one afternoon
• Z1s were pre-configured in the Meraki dashboard, shipped to remote workers, and up and running once plugged in with no on-site support needed
• MX64W, an all-in-one wireless and security device, shipped to Croatia to support team of 20
• One-time setup for VPN on MX Security Appliance and customizable SSIDs and splash login page on MR Access Points

With Meraki, we check some boxes in the dashboard and we’re good to go. We spent an initial 15 minutes setting up our SSIDs, tested them, and haven’t looked at them since. Jon Rauschenberger, CTO, Clarity Consulting 

Results

• Lean IT team spends minimal time managing network through user-friendly dashboard
• Remote workforce easily and securely accesses internal servers and databases, leading to more efficiency
• Layer 7 application visibility and traffic analytics help team make decisions on constraining applications with no business use
• Network health checks are available via the dashboard on any web browser or phone from anywhere in the world