Meraki Upgrades Wireless LAN Offering With Identity Policy Manager

SAN FRANCISCO, March 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Meraki, the cloud-based wireless networking company, has announced the launch of its Identity Policy Manager (IPM) product. IPM gives organizations powerful tools to manage multiple user policies on the same network. IPM is available at no additional cost for customers using Meraki's Enterprise Cloud Controller.

Many organizations have network access policies that specify who can connect to the network, where these users can go on the network, and what networking resources they can use. Traditionally, managing these rules has been a complex, multi-vendor endeavor with potential performance degradation, multiple points of failure, and more complicated troubleshooting.  Meraki's IPM product streamlines this process by enabling administrators to set access control policies across multiple wireless sites from a web browser. Integrated into Meraki's award-winning Cloud Controller – the cloud-based centralized management system that controls and monitors thousands of Meraki networks over the web – customers are able to set different bandwidth and quality of service parameters, prohibit wireless clients from communicating with each other, and allow only certain employees to access sensitive LAN resources, among other features.

The MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) has already successfully adopted Meraki's IPM product.  "At MIT, we have a specific way to control which devices have which privileges on our network," said Jack Costanza, Director of Infrastructure at MIT CSAIL.  "Meraki's IPM lets us integrate our existing policies with the wireless LAN, without having to pay for yet another software license."

"At Meraki, we're always looking for ways to make wireless LAN easier to deploy and manage," said Hans Robertson, VP Product Management at Meraki.  "High-end features like policy enforcement firewalls are ripe for innovation since they have historically been expensive and needlessly complex.  We've made this sophisticated feature set more accessible to organizations – first, by making it easier to configure, and second, by making it more affordable."

Meraki's IPM product includes the following features:

• Identity-based policy controls: Apply rules such as VLAN tagging, firewall access control lists (ACLs), and bandwidth limits on a per-device, per-user, or per-group basis.
• Policy groups: Define groups of users and set different policies for each group.
• Intuitive configuration: Fine-grained rules and policies can be set quickly and easily via the Meraki Cloud Controller's elegant browser-based interface.
• Seamless integration: IPM integrates into an existing Active Directory or RADIUS environment with ease.
• Massive scalability: IPM policies are enforced at the edge of the network to offer superior scalability and performance compared to hardware controller-based systems.
• Simple end-user experience: Meraki's identity-based policy controls can be enforced over a single SSID, which simplifies the user experience of clients connecting to the network.

IPM will be generally available in April 2010.

About Meraki

Meraki offers enterprise-class wireless networks at a fraction of the cost and complexity of traditional networking vendors.  Meraki's unique cloud-based architecture enables an administrator to centrally configure and monitor thousands of wireless access points over the web. The company's customers range from small and medium-sized businesses to global hotel chains to world-class educational institutions. Meraki wireless networks serve millions of users on over 14,000 networks in more than 140 countries. Meraki is located in San Francisco, California, and is funded in part by Sequoia Capital and Google. Follow Meraki on Facebook and Twitter. For more information, go to www.meraki.com.

SOURCE Meraki