Last updated June 6th, 2024 by Avigdor Book
Organizations in industries ranging from retail to manufacturing and managed service providers have embraced Cisco Meraki’s software-defined networking technology. Meraki’s software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) approach allows network administrators to easily manage the enterprise networks of branch locations from a central hub with a cloud-based management console.
Though Meraki’s tools and software make managing remote networks easier, adding new infrastructure to a multi-vendor network can increase the overall complexity for network managers. Tufin’s native integration with Cisco Meraki streamlines that management and makes it easier for admins to integrate Meraki solutions into their hybrid and heterogenous environments and provides greater visibility of the network once Meraki is integrated.
Tufin helps you quickly analyze your Meraki network elements and rules and gain insight into them. Instead of having to hunt for issues in your architecture and traffic policies, Tufin’s tools highlight them for you, keeping you up to speed on everything you need to know about your Meraki network, from network access to troubleshooting.
Key Benefits of Tufin’s Integration with Cisco Meraki
There are four main benefits you get from Tufin’s integration with Cisco Meraki:
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Centralized visibility and control across all policies using Rule Viewer
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Gain compliance assurance and enable network segmentation with Unified Security Policy
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Visualize your network and troubleshoot network connectivity issues with an Interactive Topology Map
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Access built-in reporting to ensure compliance, audit readiness, and network connectivity
Let’s break down these different benefits in a little more detail.
Centralized visibility and policy control with Rule Viewer: You might have dozens or even hundreds of rules associated with your Meraki architecture. Network admins and their staff do not have the time or ability to sift through every rule and determine which ones could be creating network vulnerabilities. Tufin’s Rule Viewer helps streamline the integration of Meraki-based rules and improves your security posture through centralized visibility and control across all your policies. You can quickly see which rules are permissive or redundant, and you can quickly identify and mitigate any issues in an automated fashion.
Enhance compliance and security with Unified Security Policy: The USP lets you enforce and manage your security policies across your hybrid and heterogeneous network environments. By integrating with Meraki, Tufin can simplify and speed up the process of identifying different access rules within your Meraki infrastructure that are not in compliance, say, with a certain network segmentation policy that your organization needs to comply with.
For example, a compliance regime like the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard could mandate that two segments of your network should not have any connectivity between them. Meraki tools can help enforce this policy and Tufin’s USP can ensure that you know if you are out of compliance with those tools. This helps reduce your attack surface and ensures your organization can pass any audits.
Visualize and troubleshoot your network with interactive topology mapping: By its nature, a software-defined network managed from a central hub is a distributed network. Tufin’s interactive topology map helps visualize Meraki devices across the network and quickly troubleshoot any connectivity issues. For example, if a developer cannot access the database needed for a critical business application, it might be because a configuration in a firewall was changed, blocking connectivity. Normally, the developer would report this issue and a network admin would need to investigate the source of the outage.
The topology map, using path analysis, can instantly query the topology to see if there is a rule change blocking access. If the rule is connected to Meraki infrastructure, Tufin’s integration can reveal that immediately and shorten the time needed to troubleshoot the problem. If it’s not rule-related, the map can still help reduce the amount of time network admins spend troubleshooting.
Ensure compliance with built-in reporting: As with all Tufin integrations, you also gain access to built-in reporting to ensure compliance, audit readiness and network connectivity. You can generate and receive audit reports much faster. And if your Meraki infrastructure or rules change, all of those changes will be fully documented and instantly reportable.
Tufin Builds on a Longtime Partnership with Cisco
Tufin is proud to be a long-time premier security policy management partner of Cisco with integrations supporting not just Cisco Meraki, but also many Cisco services, including:
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Cisco ACI
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Cisco ASA
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Cisco Firewall Management Center (FMC)
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IOS L3 Switch (IOS or IOS XE)
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IOS-XR, IOS-XE SD-WAN (Viptela cEdge)
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Nexus
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Cisco Security Manager (CSM)
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IOS or IOS XE routers.
Many Tufin customers have adopted Meraki technology to manage their enterprise networks. Meraki simplifies network setup and maintenance with its cloud-managed solutions, allowing users to configure and monitor their networks from a centralized dashboard.
Meraki solutions scale seamlessly, making it easy to add or modify services and devices without significant reconfiguration. And they enable remote management of all network components from a single interface. This approach also reduces the need for physical hardware and dedicated IT personnel, helping organizations reduce overall IT costs.
For existing Tufin customers, it is easy to integrate new Meraki devices and rules into Tufin Orchestration Suite to ensure that they can be visualized and managed in an automated way.
Conclusion
Customers value Meraki for its easy deployment, centralized management, and robust security features, which are ideal for managing complex IT networks efficiently and securely.
Tufin’s native integration with Meraki improves the security posture of Meraki networks. It helps ensure continuous compliance and enables full rule lifecycle management.
You gain enhanced visibility into your network, can centrally and automatically manage rules and network change management, and more easily troubleshoot any issues that arise.
Learn more about Tufin’s integration with Meraki and how Tufin can help you automate your network security and change management.
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