Francesco Smalto

Overview

An established purveyor of fine workmanship and bespoke tailoring, Francesco Smalto is an historic establishment based in Paris, France. As the workshop has gained prominence and recognition, the company has opened additional locations, now totaling 10 shops throughout the country. With orders taken at stores and crafted in the Paris workshop, employees needed a reliable network to connect the locations.

Challenges

• Store locations distributed throughout the country, but needed to reliably and quickly connect back to the main Paris location
• Needed a secure tunnel between locations for the transfer of business-critical communications and customer information

There’s nothing simpler to install; we just set the configuration on the devices in the Meraki dashboard and then connected them. Nothing more.

Luc Pendic

Administrateur Systèmes & Réseaux

Why Cisco Meraki

• Built-in Auto VPN establishes reliable site-to-site connections in a few mouse clicks, while the Cisco Meraki cloud architecture maintains and self-heals the VPN connections as needed
• Ease of administration over the distributed devices using the intuitive dashboard frees up time for employees to focus on other business needs
• Centralized management permits admins to have complete visibility over the entire network
• The ability to pre-configure devices and settings enables quick deployment without the need for onsite IT

The Deployment

• Installed various Cisco Meraki security appliances in stores, including models integrated with WiFi at 6 locations
• Fully deployed and configured all devices for each location in just two weeks
• Cisco Meraki devices pre-configured in the web-based dashboard, followed by simple plug-and-play once on-site
• Group policies configured by device type for employees and guests that limit application usage and access, as well as overall bandwidth usage

Results

• Built-in location analytics provide real-time insight into dwell times and repeat visits across locations that shed light on ways to improve customer engagement and loyalty
• Seamless transition from the legacy system to Cisco Meraki for end-users and employees, causing no disruptions
• Cisco Meraki MX60 Security Appliances consolidate WiFi and VPN functionality into one device enabling a simplified deployment
• Intuitive dashboard provides complete Layer 7 visibility into clients and applications on the network
• Employees at branches connect reliably and simply back to headquarters using auto-provisioning IPsec VPN
• Network admins can manage or troubleshoot problems at any branch remotely using live tools in the dashboard
• Seamless firmware updates automatically push feature releases to ensure a future proof network without any additional cost or complexity