Cisco Start
Airtasker’s co-working space, Tank Stream Labs, had used Cisco Meraki - part of the Cisco Start portfolio designed for SMBs - to enable its disparate teams of remote and mobile workers
Airtasker had always found it trouble-free, secure and intuitive, so it was definitely at the top of their shortlist when comparing prospective networking solutions of their own. And after a period of due-diligence, it came out the clear winner:
“We’d been using Cisco Meraki for the last three years, and never had a problem with it,” said Paul Keen, “which is something I definitely can’t say for other solutions I’ve used! When we investigated the alternatives, we quickly found that there was nothing out there that came even remotely close to it.”
Paul also found it easy to set up: “All it took was a couple of hours to get up and running; they send out a professional to get you set up, and by mid-morning, you’re good to go.”
Perhaps more importantly, ongoing operation and adaptation is equally as easy. “It’s always worth having the professionals around to help you set up - especially when it comes to security - however with just a little bit of up-front support, maintenance has been so simple we can do it internally.” Without employing any additional IT resources, the Airtasker team was able to continue their headcount growth with no more than an hour of downtime over the first year of operation.
“I love the web interface,” said Paul Keen. “It’s so simple and it just works. I don’t need a technician to go into the boxes, which means that on the odd occasions when we’ve lost the internet, we can pinpoint the problem very quickly - usually straight from our dashboard. Similarly, if we need to make firewall configuration changes, we don’t need someone to come in; it’s very intuitive for us to just log into the system and make those small changes ourselves.”
Security has also become just as important to Airtasker as their network in recent years with the ever-increasing threat of cyber attacks. “People are people. We’re all capable of making mistakes,” admitted Paul keen. “Without the right security in place, all it takes is one person to click a bad link, and your servers and data are compromised. You’re the latest ransomware victim. We sidestepped that risk altogether by simply eliminating the management and monitoring servers. We have none in our office at all. Instead, we have hundreds of managed servers in our Cisco Meraki cloud stack, and we leave the security to Cisco, because they specialise in it.”
Airtasker was able to achieve their goals without having to invest in expensive physical security, digital security or security expertise. Nor did they have to invest time and capital into disaster recovery and business continuity solutions.
