Customer Success Story: California Department of Fish and Wildlife

The Challenge

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife manages and protects the state's wide array of fish, wildlife, plant resource, and native habitats. They have over 115 sites across California that they use to monitor wildlife, but given the remoteness of some of the locations, reliable network connectivity and device visibility were a challenge.

The Solution

The department deployed Cisco Meraki APs, switches, security appliance, and mobile device management across many different sites across California. With Meraki, supplemental resiliency allows even the most remote of sites to still operate in the event of a state-wide outage. This new setup brought the flexibility to bring up and troubleshoot these remote sites from anywhere in the world via the cloud-based Meraki Dashboard.

The Results

A core MX400 security appliance was installed in the department's HQ as a hub, with branch and remote sites using MX60(W)s, MX80s, or MX90 security appliances for site-to-site VPN connectivity.

The department's users can now access their network through 802.1X with RADIUS authentication, with no bandwidth or SSID availability restrictions. Guest users can now log onto a password protected network with Layer 3 firewall rules blocking access to the local LAN.

Systems Manager MDM was also installed to easily manage all the department's devices, such as iPads used by field scientists.

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