Single-vendor networking estates simplify procurement and support, but they cost enterprises negotiating leverage, expose them to renewal pricing shocks, and restrict the BBBEE procurement dispersion that preferential-procurement scorecards require. A growing number of South African CTOs are deliberately architecting hybrid estates: Cisco core, Fortinet perimeter, HPE Aruba access, Arista in the data centre, and third-party […]

Cisco’s End-of-Life policy gives enterprises five years of Hardware Replacement coverage and TAC support after a product reaches End of Sale. Last Date of Support is a hard cutoff. Thousands of Catalyst 3850s, Nexus 5K and 7K chassis, ASR 1002 units and Aironet access points across South African banks, retailers, healthcare providers and ISPs are […]

Cisco Meraki is the cloud-managed networking platform built for South African multi-site businesses that want enterprise-grade security and single-dashboard visibility without the complexity of traditional network management. The subscription licensing model is what makes this possible: included firmware updates, 24/7 Cisco support, automatic security patches and hardware-agnostic transfer rights are bundled into one predictable per-device […]

The cabling underneath your network determines what the equipment on top of it can do. A R95,000 Cisco Catalyst 9300 with 10G ports connected to Cat5e cable will never deliver more than 1 Gbps. A Wi-Fi 6E access point on a 1G port will bottleneck every wireless client. In South Africa, where network refreshes are […]