Meraki Group Policies

I keep hearing from my customers that we must make management easier so I wanted to quickly share with you about one of my favorite features called Meraki Group Policies. A Group Policy is a way to control network traffic in a Merak fabric. A Group Policy can control things like L3/L7 Firewall policies, Traffic shaping, content filtering (block gambling,streaming audio etc.), Advanced Malware Protection etc.

Here are some use cases for Group Policies. You can get creative as to how you want to apply them.

1.  Identify a user (Tim Roth in HR) and build a group policy to control how much bandwidth I have for streaming audio and block me from talking to HR servers. A cool thing here is that you only need a radius server and Meraki fabric to make this happen, no additional licensing needed.
2. Limit backup traffic during the day: For a remote site, we can create a Group Policy that is only applied during the day to limit backup traffic from saturating the WAN link. Then, when it is 5pm, the Group Policy is inactive and backup traffic can use the entire link.
3. Identify guest clients, redirect them to authenticate through splash page and control where they can go, both internally and on the interwebs.
4. Blacklist a rogue client: Say you receive an alert from Meraki Security Center that states you have a client that is spreading malware in your environment, simply go to the client view in your Meraki Dashboard, right click on the client and apply a Blacklist Group Policy directly. This Group Policy will halt the clients communication. VERY POWERFUL.

Meraki Group policies have been HUGE for some of my customers. They are leveraging the Meraki fabric to identify their clients and apply network control policies to them.  In most cases, they don’t have to go out and buy additional software, licensing etc. It’s like a real world network control system….that anyone can manage.

The following are ways to control traffic with Group Policies. As you can see some features are not universal to all platforms.  (Image from Meraki.com)

The next image highlights way to apply the Group Policies.

Check out this  link that provides more technical detail on Meraki Group Policies.

https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Group_Policies_and_Blacklisting/Creating_and_Applying_Group_Policies

Stay tuned for future posts on Meraki Group Policies…..