Cisco Meraki MX450
Powerful Security and SD-WAN for the Branch & Campus

Features:

Identity-Based Firewall

Automatically assigns firewall and traffic shaping rules, VLAN tags, and bandwidth limits to enforce the right policies for each class of users.

Intrusion Prevention

Protects critical network resources from the latest security threats and vulnerabilities.

Auto VPN

Securely connects branch locations using mesh or hub-and-spoke tMopologies. Provides simple VPN access into Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Content Filtering

Block undesirable web content across 70+ categories, and leverage cloud lookups to filter billions of URLs.

Advanced Malware Protection

Protect your network against malware using the latest threat intelligence, and identify previously unknown malicious files with retrospective detection.

High Availability & Failover

Provides device and connection integrity through multiple uplinks, warm spare failover, and self-healing VPN.

Application Visibility & Control

Identify which applications are being used, and then prioritize critical apps while limiting recreational apps.

Centralized Management

Seamlessly manage campus-wide WiFi deployments and distributed multi-site networks from a single pane-of-glass.

Cloud Management:

Cisco Meraki's cloud based management provides centralized visibility & control over Cisco Meraki's wired & wireless networking hardware, without the cost and complexity of wireless controllers or overlay management systems. Integrated with Cisco Meraki's entire product portfolio, cloud management provides feature rich, scalable, and intuitive centralized management for networks of any size.

Highlights

• Unified visibility and control of the entire network via a single dashboard: wireless, switching, and security appliances
• Streamlines large networks with tens of thousands of endpoints
• Zero-touch provisioning for rapid deployment
• Built-in multi site network management tools
• Automated network monitoring and alerts
• Intuitive interface eliminates costly training or added staff
• Network tagging engine - search and sync settings by tag
• Role-based administration and auditable change logs
• Continuous feature updates delivered from the cloud
• Highly available and secure (PCI / HIPAA compliant)

Cloud Managed Networks

Cisco Meraki's hardware products are built from the ground up for cloud management. As a result, they come out of the box with centralized control, layer 7 device and application visibility, real time web-based diagnostics, monitoring, reporting, and much more.

Cisco Meraki networks deploy quickly and easily, without training or dedicated staff. Moreover, Cisco Meraki provides a rich feature set that provides complete control over devices, users, and applications, allowing for flexible access policies and rich security without added cost or complexity.

Cisco Meraki's cloud management provides the features, security, and scalability for networks of any size. Cisco Meraki scales from small sites to campuses, and even distributed networks with thousands of sites. Cisco Meraki devices, which self-provision via the cloud, can be deployed in branches without IT. Firmware and security signature updates are delivered seamlessly, over the web. With the cloud, branches can automatically establish secure VPN tunnels between one another with a single click.

With a secure, PCI and HIPAA compliant architecture and fault tolerant design that preserves local network functionality during WAN outages, Cisco Meraki is field proven in high security and mission critical network applications.

Cloud Management Architecture

Cisco Meraki's architecture provides feature rich network management without on-site management appliances or WiFi controllers.

Every Cisco Meraki device - including wirelesss access points, Ethernet switches, and security appliances - connects over the Internet to Cisco Meraki's datacenters, which run Cisco Meraki's cloud management platform. These connections, secured via SSL, utilize a patented protocol that provides real time visibility and control, yet uses minimal bandwidth overhead (typically 1 kbps or less.)

In place of traditional command-line based network configuration, Cisco Meraki provides a rich web based dashboard, providing visibility and control over up to tens of thousands of Cisco Meraki devices, anywhere in the world. Tools, designed to scale to large and distributed networks, make policy changes, firmware updates, deploying new branches, etc. simple and expedient, regardless of size or location. Cisco Meraki's real time protocols combine the immediacy of on-premise management applications with the simplicity and centralized control of a cloud application.

Every Cisco Meraki device is engineered for cloud management. Specifically, this means that Cisco Meraki devices are designed with memory and CPU resources to perform packet processing, QoS, layer 3-7 security, encryption, etc. at the network edge. As a result, no network traffic passes through the cloud, with the cloud providing management functionality out of the data path. This architecture enables networks to scale horizontally, adding capacity simply by adding more endpoints, without concern for centralized bottlenecks or chokepoints. Equally important, since all packet processing is performed on premise, end-user functionality is not compromised if the network's connection to the cloud is interrupted.

Cisco Meraki's cloud platform is designed to spread computation and storage across independent server clusters in geographically isolated datacenters. Any server or datacenter can fail without affecting customers or the rest of the system. Additionally, Cisco Meraki's datacenter design is field proven to support tens of thousands of endpoints.

Cloud Management Architecture

Powerful Insight and Troubleshooting Tools

Cisco Meraki's cloud architecture delivers powerful insight and includes live tools integrated directly into the dashboard, giving instant analysis of performance, connectivity, and more. Using live tools, network administrators no longer need to go on site to perform routine troubleshooting tests. Visibility into devices, users, and applications gives administrators the information needed to enforce security policies and enable the performance needed in today's demanding network environments.

Troubleshooting tools such as ping, traceroute, throughput, and even live packet captures are integrated directly into the Cisco Meraki dashboard, dramatically reducing resolution times and enabling troubleshooting at remote locations without on-site IT staff.

Layer 7 application visibility

Integrated multi-site management

Live Troubleshooting Tools

User and Device Fingerprints

Automatic E-mail Alerts

Scheduled Firmware Updates

Out-of-Band Control Plane

Cisco Meraki's out-of-band control plane separates network management data from user data. Management data (e.g., configuration, statistics, monitoring, etc.) flows from Cisco Meraki devices (wireless access points, switches, and security appliances) to Cisco Meraki's cloud over a secure Internet connection. User data (web browsing, internal applications, etc.) does not flow through the cloud, instead flowing directly to its destination on the LAN or across the WAN.

Advantages of an out of band control plane:

Scalability

• Unlimited throughput: no centralized controller bottlenecks
• Add devices or sites without MPLS tunnels
• Add switching capacity without stacking limitations

Reliability

• Redundant cloud service provides high availability
• Network functions even if management traffic is interrupted

Security

• No user traffic passes through Cisco Meraki's datacenters
• Fully HIPAA / PCI compliant

What happens if a network loses connectivity to the Cisco Meraki cloud?
Because of Cisco Meraki's out of band architecture, most end users are not affected if Cisco Meraki wireless APs, switches, or security appliances cannot communicate with Cisco Meraki's cloud services (e.g., because of a temporary WAN failure):

• Users can access the local network (printers, file shares, etc.)
• If WAN connectivity is available, users can access the Internet
• Network policies (firewall rules, QoS, etc.) continue to be enforced
• Users can authenticate via 802.1X/RADIUS and can roam wirelessly between access points
• Users can initiate and renew DHCP leases
• Established VPN tunnels continue to operate
• Local configuration tools are available (e.g., device IP configuration)

While Cisco Meraki's cloud is unreachable, management, monitoring, and hosted services are temporarily unavailable:

• Configuration and diagnostic tools are unavailable
• Usage statistics are stored locally until the connection to the cloud is re-established, at which time they are pushed to the cloud
• Splash pages and related functionality are unavailable

Cisco Meraki Datacenter Design

Cisco Meraki's cloud management service is colocated in tier-1, SAS70 type II certified datacenters. These datacenters feature state of the art physical and cyber security and highly reliable designs. All Cisco Meraki services are replicated across multiple independent datacenters, so that customer-facing services fail over rapidly in the event of a catastrophic datacenter failure.

Security Tools for Administrators

In addition to Cisco Meraki's secure out-of-band architecture and hardened datacenters, Cisco Meraki provides a number of tools for administrators to maximize the security of their network deployments. These tools provide optimal protection, visibility, and control over your Cisco Meraki network.

Two-factor authentication
Two-factor authentication adds an extra layer of security to an organization's network by requiring access to an administrator's phone, in addition to her username and password, in order to log in to Cisco Meraki's cloud services. Cisco Meraki's two factor authentication implementation uses secure, convenient, and cost effective SMS technology: after entering their username and password, an administrator is sent an a one-time passcode via SMS, which they must enter before authentication is complete. In the event that a hacker guesses or learns an administrator's password, she still will not be able to access the organization's account, as the hacker does not have the administrator's phone. Cisco Meraki includes two-factor authentication for all enterprise users at no additional cost.

Password policies
Organization-wide security policies for Cisco Meraki accounts help protect access to the Cisco Meraki dashboard. These tools allow administrators to:

• Force periodic password changes (e.g., every 90 days)
• Require minimum password length and complexity
• Lock users out after repeated failed login attempts
• Disallow password reuse
• Restrict logins by IP address

Role-based administration
Role-based administration lets supervisors appoint administrators for specific subsets of an organization, and specify whether they have read-only access to reports and troubleshooting tools, administer managed guest access, or can make configuration changes to the network. This minimizes the chance of accidental or malicious misconfiguration, and restricts errors to isolated parts of the network.

Configuration change alerts
The Cisco Meraki system can automatically send human-readable email and text message alerts when configuration changes are made, enabling the entire IT organization to stay abreast of new policies. Change alerts are particularly important with large or distributed IT organizations.

Configuration and login audits
Cisco Meraki logs the time, IP, and approximate location (city, state) of logged in administrators. A searchable configuration change log indicates what configuration changes were made, who they were made by, and which part of the organization the change occurred in.

SSL certificates
Cisco Meraki accounts can only be accessed via https, ensuring that all communication between an administrator's browser and Cisco Meraki's cloud services is encrypted.

Idle Timeout
30 seconds before being logged out, users are shown a notice that allows them to extend their session. Once time expires, users are asked to log in again.

Specifications:

License Editions:

An organization must have a valid Enterprise Edition license or Advanced Security Edition license for the MX series in order to work properly. Each organization is licensed for a maximum number of security appliances for a certain amount of time (typically from one year to five years).

In addition, each organization is required to use either the Enterprise Edition or the Advanced Security Edition uniformly. For example, you can have all 25 appliances using Enterprise Edition or Advanced Security Edition, but you cannot have 20 appliances using one edition and 5 using the other edition. If you wish to use Enterprise Edition for some appliances and Advanced Security Edition for other appliances, you need to create two organizations, one for your appliances with the Enterprise Edition, and another for the appliances with the Advanced Security Edition.

You can manage a given organization's licenses on the Organization > License info page. The page displays the following information:

• Status: OK or problem
• Expiration date
• MX Advanced Security Enabled or Disabled
• Licensed device limit for each device type
• Current device count for each device type
• License history (list of licenses that have been applied to the network)

Enterprise vs. Advance Security license

The following table provides a list of the major features and the required licensing.

Adding licenses

You can add a license by clicking Add another license. You will then have two actions, or "operations", to choose from:

• License more devices: increases the number of devices that can exist within this Cisco Meraki Dashboard organization.
• Renew my Dashboard license: extends the licensing period of this Cisco Meraki Dashboard organization. You must renew the license for all devices in the organization. You cannot renew licensing for only certain devices within the organization.

You cannot add an Enterprise MX license to an Advanced Security organization. Adding an Advanced Security license to an Enterprise organization will convert that organization to Advanced Security. All existing Enterprise MX licenses will have their duration halved to compensate for the difference in the licensing costs, and the organization's license cotermination date will be adjusted accordingly.

Expired licenses or exceeding the licensed device limit

If an organization's license is expired or the number of devices in the organization exceeds the licensed limit, the administrator has 30 days to return the organization to a valid licensed state. During this grace period, the system reminds the administrator to add additional licenses. After 30 days, administrators are not able to access the Dashboard (except to add additional licenses) and all Cisco Meraki equipment in the organization will cease to function.

Documentation:

Download the Cisco Meraki MX Series Datasheet (PDF).