Hey everyone,

I hope y’all had a great mothers day over the weekend, celebrating the other important half!

Recently I have had the absolute pleasure of finally getting to deploy a Meraki SD WAN through Azure. I had some initial challenges with Azure but that was my lack of understanding and once I learned how appliances worked in there I was all good.

So if you are interested in doing this so you can see how powerful and easy this solution would be for your business then contact your local Meraki sales rep and request a free trial of a VMX, obviously you will also need an MX and be setup with Azure, outside of that all you need to do is make time!

Instead of me writing up a guide, I want to share an absolutely fantastic guide on how to do this by a gentleman by the name of Nicolas Michel.

This is an excellent guide and goes over from start to finish on how to get started with creating your own SD WAN with Azure and connecting it to your home or office MX. It will then connect to a resource in Azure, this can obviously be modified to meet your requirements but he at least provides solid process on what you need to do. Kudos Nicolas Michel, this is a well written guide!

I was really impressed with this whole process, it was really easy. It goes to show building a WAN for your business does not need to be complicated. I always like to think of the network as being an enabler not another business problem to deal with. Whilst not always possible, things are changing. Software Defined Networking (AKA: SDN) was the spark, it highlighted how complexity was preventing business growth. Meraki is an SDN device that provides Software Defined WAN networking (links provided below for anyone who is unfamiliar with yet more IT acronyms).

Meraki is a real enabler for so many businesses at many different sizes, it has solved a problem that many businesses had been persevering with for so long or simply were putting off for the dreaded fear of having yet another complicated system to manage.

Deploying this solution to Azure, I can easily see that I don’t need an ISP or a high level network engineer to build some complicated WAN for my 2 – 6 branch offices and how they securely connect to Azure, I can do it all with a click of a few buttons with Meraki and Azure!

I hope you guys enjoyed doing a test deployment of this solution, if you had any troubles contact me here in this post or on my Twitter/LinkedIn profiles, and I will be happy to help you out.

If you are a QLD resident, I have recently in conjunction with Scott Williamson & Clint Palm from Meraki started up the Queensland Meraki User Group (QMUG). Here is the link to the group to join up and be part of this amazing and fast growing community of Meraki users!

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeD2hJ9erqmlZ6m7a6EQue1b_xPedokwdf9lpnfT1M7CPFxwg/viewform

Have a great rest of your week everyone!