Connect. Secure. Manage.
Meraki Hub and Spoke Networks
Design hub-and-spoke Meraki networks with clear hub selection, branch reachability and access to shared services across the WAN.
Devices supported
across the UK
Client locations
supported
Traffic handled
at peak time
Average
response time
Average response is not a resolution time or a contractual guarantee. Support scope and response commitments are agreed for each engagement.
Meraki hub and spoke networks organise connectivity around central locations that provide routes or services to remote sites. The approach can be straightforward to manage, but it concentrates dependencies at the hubs and needs a deliberate plan for inter-site traffic. MCI Network Services designs supported Meraki topologies around the actual application locations, available transports and operational responsibilities, rather than assuming a centralised layout is automatically the right fit for every business.
The whole path
Understand how sites, providers, cloud networks and security controls fit together.
Resilience that can be tested
Separate a second circuit from genuine end-to-end service resilience.
Provider coordination
Keep addressing, routing and escalation ownership clear across organisations.
Identify why traffic needs a hub
We establish which services sit at central sites and which traffic genuinely needs to pass through them. Private applications, shared infrastructure and central inspection may justify hub connectivity. Cloud applications and ordinary internet traffic may require a different treatment, depending on security policy and performance requirements.
The topology should reflect those flows. Sending every connection through a hub can add latency and consume central capacity without improving control if the relevant service is elsewhere. We document the intended path for each major traffic class so the design can be reviewed by both network and application owners.
Standards & partnerships
Confidence in the team behind your network.
Cisco Partner
Cisco Meraki
Cyber Essentials
Cyber Essentials PlusMCI Network Services is operated by Proxar Ltd. Certifications apply to the certified legal entity and the scope of its certificates. View accreditation information
Choose hubs with independent service value
A hub's suitability depends on its appliance or virtual platform, connectivity and access to the required applications. We assess upstream routing, security devices, power or hosting dependencies and the available support arrangements. A technically capable hub may still be unsuitable if its surrounding infrastructure is a single point of failure.
Where more than one hub is proposed, we examine whether they provide genuinely useful alternatives. A secondary hub must have the necessary routes and capacity, and its dependencies should be understood. Two hubs that share the same unavailable application or carrier cannot provide resilience against that particular failure.
A useful starting point
Not sure where to start?
Bring the requirement. We will help you define the engineering work.
Define spoke reachability and permitted relationships
Each spoke needs an explicit set of networks and services it may reach. We review advertised prefixes, segment boundaries and supported VPN policy. A private tunnel does not establish that every branch should communicate freely with every other branch or reach administrative interfaces at the central site.
Spoke-to-spoke requirements are considered separately from access to hub services. We verify the supported forwarding behaviour and any effect on hub bandwidth or security inspection. Where a different topology better suits a particular application, the exception is documented rather than hidden in a configuration that no longer matches the stated design.
Different environments. The same care.
Built around the work
your network supports.
Finance, banking and the wider private sector. We start with the systems and people that depend on your connections.
Finance & banking
Market-data paths, routing and provider coordination on clients’ behalf.
Financial-market services ↗Offices & multi-site teams
Reliable access between people, workplaces and business applications.
Office network design ↗Data centres & cloud
Network boundaries, workload connections and operational ownership.
Data centre networks ↗Plan route preferences and return paths
The selected hub order and surrounding routes influence where traffic goes during normal operation and after a failure. We examine the return path from central applications to the spokes, especially where other routers, firewalls or cloud gateways are involved. A branch can have a valid route to a server while the server's response follows an unsuitable path.
We also identify competing reachability through other VPNs or WAN services. Meraki routing behaviour is checked for the actual deployment rather than assumed to match a generic router. The design records which path is preferred and how obsolete routes will be removed during a migration.
Size the central services for degraded operation
Hub capacity must account for aggregated branch traffic and the functions enabled on the platform. Normal load is only part of the question. If one hub or uplink fails, the remaining path may need to carry substantially more traffic while still meeting the business's most important requirements.
We define the priorities and limitations of that reduced-service state. A backup connection may be adequate for critical applications but not for every software download or non-essential workload. The customer should understand those limits before an outage, rather than learning them when all branches move to the remaining hub.
Validate the topology with a representative pilot
The pilot includes branches with relevant addressing, transport and application differences. We verify the expected routes, application access and restrictions. Testing from user endpoints helps identify DNS, authentication and local routing dependencies that are not visible from tunnel status alone.
Agreed failure tests observe both loss and restoration of a hub or transport. We check application recovery and whether the topology returns to the intended state without repeated disruption. Any scenario that cannot safely be tested is recorded as a limitation rather than described as proven resilience.
Operate the hub as a shared dependency
Monitoring should make reduced redundancy visible even when every branch remains connected. The handover identifies hub owners, provider contacts, recovery access and the evidence needed to separate a central fault from a local branch issue. Changes to hub routing or policy receive review appropriate to their estate-wide impact.
Our Meraki VPN concentrator deployment service can implement central endpoints where that role fits the architecture. MCI can also assess an inherited hub-and-spoke estate that has grown beyond its original design. Share the site and application map so we can establish whether the topology remains appropriate and what needs to change before further expansion.
Technical references
- Meraki Auto VPN general best practices — Cisco / Cisco Meraki
- VPN concentrator deployment guide — Cisco / Cisco Meraki
Talk to a specialist
What does your network need next?
Tell us what you are planning, changing or trying to improve. We will help define a practical next step and the engineering scope.
+44 203 196 6566Choose option 1
sales@proxar.co.ukUK-wide service.
Most of our engineers are based in Kent, with a focus on London, Sussex, Essex and Berkshire.
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