Fondazione Milano

Overview

Established in 2000, Fondazione Milano is formed of four independent schools specialising in Music, Languages, Drama & Film/Television. The schools educate more than 2,500 students with over 400 staff members that are distributed across six campuses in Milan, Italy.

The dashboard was the main reason we selected Cisco Meraki. You have to try it to truly appreciate its beautiful simplicity!

 

Rafael Gjoka

IT Manager, Fondazione Milano

Challenges

• The previous wireless was provided by a mixture of managed and
  unmanaged access points from several vendors at each of the schools
• With the rapidly growing number of clients that needed to be served, management of the access points was complicated and not scalable
• No visibility into what the network was being used for or by whom

 

Why Cisco Meraki

• Intuitive centralised management of Cisco Meraki access points & switches across multiple locations via the web-based dashboard
• Massively scalable cloud architecture
• Plug-and-play deployment
• Layer-7 application and client visibility across wired and wireless networks
• Built-in identity-based firewall automatically assigns firewall and traffic shaping rules to enforce the right policies for each class of users
• Vendors also evaluated: Enterasys, Brocade, Meru Networks, Mobimesh

 

The Deployment

• Cisco Meraki cloud-managed indoor & outdoor wireless access points and switches
• Staff SSID integrated with Active Directory from the Cisco Meraki dashboard
• Students authenticate to the WiFi using RADIUS credentials hosted and managed through the dashboard
• Built-in stateful firewall on all Cisco Meraki access points enables blocking of peer-to-peer, web file sharing, and gaming applications on the student network
• Fondazione Milano branded splash page designed using dashboard and utilised for staff & student sign-on

 

Results

• One-time network setup and plug-and-play deployment allows each school to be live within a day
• Secure, reliable & simple network access for staff and students
• Almost 10TB of data transferred over the entire network on average
  per week
• Over 1,100 unique visitors seen on the network every week
• Zero down-time since deploying
• Built-in monitoring and reporting allowed repositioning of under-utilised APs to areas of higher density
• Increased efficiency of the IT department with access to remote live tools such as packet capture and cable testing