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SAN FRANCISCO – July 17, 2012 – Meraki, the leader in cloud managed networking, today announced a major upgrade to its MR wireless solution. This upgrade introduces Air Marshal, a state of the art wireless intrusion detection and prevention suite. Also included in the upgrade are advanced mobility features and dozens of other enhancements.

Air Marshal - next generation cloud managed wireless intrusion detection

Customers with uncompromising security requirements, such as healthcare providers, retailers, and financial institutions, are increasingly turning to Meraki’s cloud managed networking to deploy secure, scalable, and easy to manage networks. Air Marshal, Meraki’s new integrated suite of real-time wireless intrusion detection and prevention (WIDS / WIPS) tools, addresses the next generation of wireless threats.

Built for the needs of the Fortune 1000, scales to networks of any size

Air Marshal was built for the largest, most security-conscious environments. One of the first production Air Marshal deployments is a secure, PCI-compliant wireless LAN by a multi-billion dollar Fortune 1000 retailer with thousands of locations. Nonetheless, while Air Marshal is designed for the security and scalability needs of large enterprises, it is easy to use and cost effective for networks of any size.

Advanced cloud based WIPS architecture

Air Marshal enables any Meraki wireless access point to detect a wide variety of threats, including rogue access points, SSID spoofing, packet floods, and malicious broadcasts. Insecure wireless activity is classified with a heuristics-based engine, and threats like rogue access points are automatically neutralized. Attack signatures are continuously updated from the cloud, allowing Air Marshal to automatically respond to new threats. Air Marshal can operate opportunistically (i.e. when wireless APs are not actively serving clients), or full time. Unlike traditional WIPS solutions, Air Marshal is fully integrated into every Meraki access point, eliminating integration costs, controller hardware, and management complexity.

“With WiFi becoming the default access layer in enterprises, security is at the forefront of our customers’ minds,” said AJ Goldman, Chief Evangelist. “With Air Marshal, we’re pleased to offer high-grade intrusion detection and prevention without the cost and complexity of traditional solutions.”

Mobility and performance upgrades

Meraki is releasing a number of wireless improvements in addition to Air Marshal:

• Enhanced mobility architecture for improved ultra-fast roaming and inter-subnet (layer 3) mobility
• High-density video streaming optimizations
• New authentication methods including SMS-based splash page sign-on
• The release also includes dozens of performance enhancements and new features.

Available at no cost via seamless over-the-air upgrade

This upgrade is compatible with all Meraki MR-series wireless access points, and is available at no cost for all Meraki enterprise customers. Customers will be receiving upgrade availability notifications over the coming weeks and may contact Meraki support to have their network upgraded immediately.