ESP Deploys First Meraki Firewall

Avista Corp. Credit Union of Spokane, WA was the first credit union on ESP's FORZA³™ core processing platform fitted with Meraki. The credit union serves current employees and retirees of Avista Corporation, a company involved in producing, transmission, and distributing energy. Its single branch is located on the Avista Corporation campus.

Meraki is a Cisco line of products; it's a cloud-managed firewall designed for small and medium-sized businesses. ESP looked at Meraki specifically because it's light on any management requirements from the credit union, and long-term maintenance is more straightforward and elegant than other solutions.

The most significant advantage of Meraki is that it can use multiple ISPs. If a client has more than one ISP, Meraki can automatically swap to another provider if service is interrupted with no immediate configuration changes. That means the credit union can more easily and reliably connect with the core.

ESP uses this same technology in-house to maximize uptime between its internet service providers and any client on the platform.

"So, if our fiber gets cut, Meraki can failover automatically to Comcast, ensuring continued connectivity between our client credit unions and the core." - Alex Ray, ESP Network Security Engineer

If clients want to use Meraki for their primary firewall, ESP will perform all management functions. Being cloud-based, ESP can easily update and maintain settings without accessing a computer on-premises through a remote desktop. The upshot - when ESP receives a client request to make changes to their firewall, we can do it directly through the Cisco panel.

The Avista Corp. Credit Union installation was reasonably straightforward - pretty much plug-and-play. With the extra tools built into Meraki, including the ability to request packet captures, ESP's IT Team facilitated troubleshooting complex routing issues found at their location inside a public utility.