As a Small & Medium business (SMB) IT team, we understand the drill, every day for you is a balancing act, ensuring your company’s digital assets are ironclad secure, while pushing the boundaries of innovation to keep your business competitive. All of this, let’s be honest, often falls on the shoulders of a lean, dedicated but undeniably stretched IT team.
Fragmented tools and manual workflows make provisioning, change management, troubleshooting, and patching harder than they should be.
IT teams are constantly battling the perception of being a bottleneck, rather than an enabler, for growth. The reality is, managing day-one deployments and day-two operations of complex network infrastructure with limited resources can feel like an endless uphill climb.
What if there was a simpler way to manage, secure, and gain critical insights into your network?
The Cloud Networking Advantage: Keep it Simple and Secure
For IT teams on the ground the promise of “simplicity” often seems a distant dream. However with Cloud networking simplicity is possible with a direct impact on your daily operations.
One dashboard is all you need – Managing every piece of your network from Wi-Fi Access Points to switches and firewalls. Cloud-managed networking, like what you see with Cisco Meraki, gives you centralized control that makes configuration changes, monitoring and troubleshooting easier and less time-consuming.
The AI Advancements – Lean IT teams should be able to leverage AI as force multiplier. For example, Cisco AI Assistant built directly into Cisco Meraki Dashboard can help IT teams to perform complex network operations through natural language processing, eliminating the need for deep CLI knowledge or navigating through multiple dashboards.
Deploying new Gear: With Cisco Cloud Networking, “zero-touch provisioning” is a reality. All that is needed is connection your devices to the cloud and then watch it download its configuration and come online. This not only saves time, but also eliminates human error and costly need or having IT teams at every location.
Visibility, Assurance and Optimization: Let’s face it, without unified data or end-to-end visibility IT teams often end up wasting time cycling through siloed tools or blaming other vendors. Troubleshooting becomes guess work rather than a method. In contrast, a solution like Cisco Cloud Networking (Meraki) combined with ThousandEyes delivers unified, real-time visibility from user devices through network infrastructure to cloud and SaaS layers. This empowers lean IT teams to rapidly identify and remediate issues and maintain high uptime with continuous optimization.
Integrated Security, without extra complexity: SMB may not always have a dedicated Security Operation Center (SOC) needed to maintain a strong security posture; however an integrated and robust security solution is a must for any size organization. Without a unified security approach the risks are just too high.
Siloed security solutions or lack of unified threat intelligence may lead limited IT staff to spend more time responding to incidents rather than preventing them.
Cisco Cloud Networking with integrated security consolidates multiple security functions directly into network devices, which can be managed via single cloud hosted Dashboard.
In conclusion Cloud Networking hold several advantages for SMB space, however the key one is “Simplicity”. Lean IT teams can achieve management efficiency, reliability, robust security and comprehensive visibility of their networks without adding any additional layer of complexity.
To learn more about Cisco’s solutions for SMB, visit Cisco SMB
Additional Resources:
Cloud-Managed Networking: Cisco Meraki
Internet and SaaS Visibility: Cisco ThousandEyes
Secure Access Services Edge: Cisco Secure Access
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