Cisco Meraki Loses Customer Data in Engineering Gaffe (cloudpro.co.uk)

Cisco has admitted to losing customer data during a configuration change its enginners applied to its Meraki cloud managed IT service. From a report: Specific data uploaded to Cisco Meraki before 11:20 am PT last Thursday was deleted after engineers created an erroneous policy in a configuration change to its US object storage service, Cisco admitted on Friday. The company did say that the issue has been fixed, and while the error will not affect network operations in most cases, it admitted the faulty policy "but will be an inconvenience as some of your data may have been lost." Cisco hasn't said how many of its 140,000+ Meraki customers have been affected. The deleted data includes custom floor plans, logos, enterprise apps and voicemail greetings found on users' dashboard, systems manager and phones. The engineering team was working over the weekend to find out whether the data can be recovered and potentially build tools so that customers can find out what data has been lost.

Comments

Someone Else's Server

[TWX]

And this is what happens when you entrust your data to someone else's server.

I have exactly one meraki switch that's slated for replacement, I got it very cheap, but had I realized exactly what was entailed in using it I would never have bought it in the first place. I guess I like having entirely local control for my network infrastructure. Even if I can't afford Catalyst, those Linksys-derived SG-series small business switches would probably be better than Meraki if only so that I don't have to pay a subscription just to keep frames forwarding.

Re:What's a 'Cisco Meraki'?

[TWX]

Meraki is a product-line of Cisco's. Saying, "Cisco Meraki," is like saying, "Chevrolet Impala."

"Cloud-managed IT service," is a bit oversimplified but not greatly so for anyone that knows how Meraki products work. Imagine all of your managed switches, routers, WAPs, etc connecting not to your own infrastructure for centralized management, but to Cisco's infrastructure for remote-centralized management. You log in to Cisco's Meraki website and do your config changes there through a GUI instead of SSHing or otherwise consoling-in to a switch locally or using something like Prime running on your own servers.

"Cloud-managed IT service," is also not especially strong marketing-speak when you consider the definition of "cloud" as someone else's server, as we've been using the term for the better part of a decade on Slashdot and elsewhere. Given how many different disparate IT functions Meraki can potentially do, "IT service," as in network infrastructure aspects of IT, is probably the furthest one can nail it down.

Either way though, if you've been paying attention to Cisco's products then you probably have some inkling of what the Meraki product-line does or how it works.