Lam joined Grab as the first and only Network Manager and was tasked by his management team to lead the project to upgrade the Grab network. During its early days as a start-up, Grab had consumer-grade equipment across its network. With Grab continuing its rapid growth, Lam knew that he needed to look at enterprise-grade networking solutions since the consumer-grade network “had been causing connectivity problems, causing failure points, and most importantly, was not scalable.”
Lam heard about Meraki during its early days, back when the Meraki founders started the company out of MIT in 2006. Back in 2006, he admitted that he “laughed” at Meraki as he thought it was a fanciful cloud-based solution — every other solution in the market was a traditional controller-based AP. Fast forward 10 years, he confirms that he doesn’t laugh at the solution anymore. Lam understands the power of the cloud and is now a Meraki convert.
Cloud Managed IT: offering greater reliability and easier management
Shortly after joining Grab, Lam decided to evaluate the Meraki MR32 access points and MX100 security appliance through the Meraki Trial Program , alongside two other networking vendors, for their Malaysia office deployment. Lam had experience with the other vendors’ firewall from his previous roles, and knew all about the traditional solution. You would log in using CLI, create interfaces by hand, and set up all the policies manually, which in total takes a few hours. Lam trialled the MX100 side-by-side with the other solution and “never having used Meraki before, the MX100 was up and running in 10 minutes,” he said. “That speed was never achievable with the other vendor’s firewall, even with a skilled certified network operator behind the wheel.”
Meraki Access Points: optimized for a seamless user experience, faster connections and greater user capacity
With the Meraki dashboard, he was able to log in, configure, and manage the MR32 wireless solution and the MX100 security appliance without the need for CLI.
Convinced that this was the way of the future, Lam decided to go ahead with the Meraki solution for their Malaysia office.
Meraki MX100 Security Appliance: powerful networking and security for branches of any size
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