Stad Menen

Key stats

• More than 50% reduction in on-site travel by IT when dealing with networking issues
• 50% decrease in network issues and 50% decrease in the time it takes to set up a new site
• Cloud-based management allows a four-person IT team to manage across 22 locations and 850 employees

Overview

Because there were so many different services working together, it is a complex network, so it had to be very clear to us what is connected where.

JEROEN LANNOO

IT Manager, Stad Menen
Menen is a city and municipality in Belgium, located about 65 miles west of Brussels on the border with France. Stad Menen (“stad” means “city” in Dutch) has a population of nearly 35,000. The municipality comprises the city of Menen proper and the towns of Lauwe and Rekkem.

Challenge

Stad Menen needed a citywide refresh of its network, which consisted of a patchwork of legacy components that were at least seven years old, resulting in slow performance, unreliability, and cumbersome management. With more and more applications moving to the cloud, both residents and city employees needed more bandwidth and better connectivity to access digital services faster and enjoy a better application experience. With the city government spread across 22 locations and employing 850 workers, the project promised to be a major undertaking.

At the same time, the city built a brand new public service center in Lauwe that placed new demands on the network. The building, named Het Applauws, housed a variety of functions, including a local police department that needed bandwidth for security cameras and other operations, a fully automated library with no human presence at the desk, several meeting rooms, a large concert hall, a café, an internet radio station, and more. In addition to its present-day needs, the city wanted a network that could handle greater demands and new projects in the future.

Solution

In 2019, after the city contracted with a partner via an RFP process, the decision was made to use the Het Applauws building—which was not yet built at the time—as a POC. Following an extensive site survey, a blueprint was developed that would not only serve as a basis for Het Applauws, but also for other implementations at key city locations and in future buildings. Top priorities for Jeroen Lannoo, Stad Menen’s IT Manager, were standardization and streamlining. A new member of the IT team had previously worked with Meraki, and the decision was made to implement a Meraki solution in the new building as a POC.

“The building was perfect for a POC because it represented a lot of functions where we could see the added value of Meraki components,” Lannoo said.

The team initially installed a high-availability firewall solution consisting of two Meraki MX security appliances, about 25 Meraki MR access points, and several cloud-managed Meraki MS PoE switches with 24 and 48 ports. Based on the success of the POC implementation, the team chose Meraki for the rest of the refresh and began rolling out a citywide rip-and-replace strategy. Eventually, the team implemented an augmented MPLS connection with SD-WAN and layer-3 switching for better management of the network across the various locations. During the pandemic, they also implemented Microsoft 365 for all city employees.

Results

Today, the city of Menen is experiencing the benefits of cloud managed networking, a secure and open architecture that accelerates and simplifies network operations. The high-performance local network is stable, flexible, and easy to manage, enabling more tasks to be performed in less time and at lower cost. The solution established interconnectivity without the use of VPN clients or the legacy, slow MPLS network, as well as decentral internet connectivity due to local breakout per building instead of passing over the MPLS to one central breakout. Guest users at the POC building enjoy better and faster connectivity.

Easier monitoring and management are key benefits for the city’s small IT team, which consists of one IT manager, a system administrator, a part-time admin, and one full-time GIS coordinator. The cloud-first architecture eliminates repetitive tasks around network configuration, freeing up time for the IT team to focus on higher-value tasks and empowering them to make more informed decisions about the network based on detailed analytics.

With the simplicity of cloud-based management via the Meraki dashboard, troubleshooting is easier and more streamlined. In the legacy environment, which lacked a central management tool, troubleshooting required IT workers to use complicated command-line interface (CLI) processes. But with the intuitive web interface of Meraki, lesser-skilled help desk engineers who lack CLI expertise can make small changes to device configurations and help with troubleshooting. The IT team has seen a 50% decrease in network issues and spends less time overall on troubleshooting, setup, and installation—nearly half.
The dashboard also boosts security—for example, by making it possible to send updates to devices. It’s also accessible from anywhere, allowing the IT team to handle tickets, configure devices or switches, and run cable checks remotely without having to travel to any of the city’s 22 locations. The team reports more than 50% reduction in on-site travel to deal with networking issues.

“The web interface and logging also make for better security insights,” Lannoo said.

Due to budgetary restrictions, the citywide network refresh is still being rolled out in stages, but the goal is to standardize all 22 locations on the same setup and eventually move everything to the cloud because of the value, simplicity, and ease of management it delivers.