We handled everything in-house, and based on my 27 years of experience, I’ve looked at Cisco. For about 20 years, Cisco routers were the industry standard. Cisco remains a benchmark for routers. If you’re looking for firewall solutions or a security appliance, a router becomes a hybrid between firewalls, IDS, and routers. Of all the solutions I’ve evaluated, Meraki is the simplest in terms of ease of use for setup and configuration. If it's the right product for your needs, I revamped an entire wide-area network over the course of a couple of months. In total, the time spent configuring everything was less than a week. You should have a solid understanding of networking, including wider networking concepts and security, like content filtering, geofencing, and traffic limits. Knowledge of VLANs is also helpful, but you need to plan everything before implementing it. While you can always add features later, planning for them from the start is much easier. Once you understand the capabilities, allowing them in the future is a good idea. Assume you’ll need them and activate the necessary features upfront. When the time comes, you only need to configure them; no major reconfiguration will be required. If you do need them later, it’s much easier if they’ve already been enabled.
