Meraki Advanced Security License vs Enterprise, what is the difference? When clients purchase a Meraki firewall, they often wonder what the difference is between an Advanced Security license and an Enterprise license, and what they actually do for you.
As you’ll see in the chart below, the Meraki Advanced Security edition is the more robust of the two, but regardless of which one you choose, it’s important to note that you must have a valid license in order for the firewall to work properly.
Before making your decision, understand that the licensing you choose is uniform across your Organization. For example, if you have 30 appliances, you cannot have 20 using the Advanced edition and 10 using Enterprise. If you want to use Enterprise Edition for just a few of the appliances, you need to create two Organizations – one for your appliances with the Enterprise Edition, and another for those with the Advanced Security Edition.
Benefits of Meraki Advanced Security License
With security and compliance top of mind, the Advanced Security edition is our company standard. This license provides added security features that can help protect your network from various attacks. Added features include:
- Intrusion Detection / Prevention – The Meraki network will consistently monitor for and block intrusion attempts
- Geography Based Firewall Rules – Prevent traffic to or from any particular country by simply selecting that country from a drop-down menu in the Meraki dashboard.
- Content Filtering – Block certain categories of websites based on your specific organizational policies.
- YouTube for Schools – Allows students to watch educational videos while limiting access to other, non-educational videos
- Web Search Filtering – Enforce Safesearch for all users in your network
- AMP – Advanced Malware Protection is breach prevention, continuous monitoring of malicious behavior, quick malware detection, and malware removal. This extra level of protection stops advanced threats that are often missed b other security layers. This feature alone is enough to boost the advanced security edition above the enterprise license.
While the Meraki Advanced Security License is a larger investment, we feel the the added security features are worth it. This table shows a list of major features and their required license edition:
| Feature | Enterprise license | Advanced Security license |
|---|---|---|
| Stateful firewall | ✔ | ✔ |
| VLAN to VLAN routing | ✔ | ✔ |
| Link bonding / failover | ✔ | ✔ |
| 3G / 4G failover | ✔ | ✔ |
| Traffic shaping / prioritization | ✔ | ✔ |
| Site-to-site VPN | ✔ | ✔ |
| Client VPN | ✔ | ✔ |
| MPLS to VPN Failover | ✔ | ✔ |
| Splash pages | ✔ | ✔ |
| Configuration templates | ✔ | ✔ |
| HTTP content caching | ✔ | ✔ |
| Group Policies | ✔ | ✔ |
| Client connectivity alerts | ✔ | ✔ |
| SD-WAN | ✔ | ✔ |
| Geography based firewall rules | ✔ | |
| Intrusion detection / prevention | ✔ | |
| Content filtering | ✔ | |
| Youtube for Schools | ✔ | |
| Web Search Filtering | ✔ | |
| AMP | ✔ |