Cloud-Managed Networking Devices Deliver Over 90% Operational Cost Savings At Redding School District

Redding School District is one of several school districts in Redding, California. Comprised of six elementary schools and one middle school, Redding SD covers a large portion of the west side of Redding.

“We were in the middle of a quote to upgrade our switches and wireless across all our 10 campuses when I came to hear about Meraki,” recalled Seth Hemken, IT Director at Redding School District. “We were in the advanced stages – we’d chosen to go with a traditional controller-based architecture and even had wireless site surveys completed based on that.”

Hemken’s first experience of the dashboard came when a friend recommended him to a Meraki webinar. “After the webinar, I was so excited about Meraki and the dashboard that I set up Systems Manager to manage our PCs right away,” said Hemken. Meraki Systems Manager enables centralized device management of thousands of mobile and desktop devices in the secure, browser-based Meraki dashboard. “From that I was sold on the concept of the dashboard before even testing any Meraki devices!” said Hemken.

Hemken set up his free Meraki wireless access point for attending a webinar at home in short order. “The set up of the webinar AP really cemented that Meraki was the solution for us, as it was exceptionally elegant,” said Hemken. Meraki devices can be configured as soon as they are ordered, even before they leave the warehouse, from anywhere in the world using an intuitive browser-based portal – the Cisco Meraki dashboard. This consequently means there is no need for a skilled network engineer onsite in order to get Meraki devices online. The devices simply need to be plugged in and they will automatically tunnel a secure connection to the cloud and download their configuration settings.