Flame University
Flame University, a top liberal education institution in Pune, India, offers interdisciplinary programs and is renowned for academic excellence and shaping future leaders.
Flame University modernizes its network with Cisco Meraki
Flame University needed a reliable, flexible, and secure digital backbone to power its growing smart campus vision—an invisible, powerful infrastructure connecting everything.
The Need for Transformation
For Flame University, technology is not an accessory, but an essential component of how they think, teach, and foster growth. They’ve envisioned a campus where technology should be invisible, seamless, and effortless, allowing learning to be uninterrupted.
Yet, for all its commitment to interdisciplinary learning, global outreach, and a fully digital ecosystem, Flame University's existing technological infrastructure proved inadequate to support its ambitions. The reality on the ground was far from effortless: the IT team found themselves restarting switches and fielding user complaints every few hours.
Ultimately, the unreliable and inefficient network was a bottleneck, hindering the seamless experience Flame University aimed to provide. Recognizing this critical limitation, the university understood it needed to rebuild its entire infrastructure from the ground up, to provide the robust foundation for the campus Flame aspires to be.
Pioneering Digital Transformation
Recognizing the critical need for a truly transformative solution, Flame University strategically partnered with Cisco Meraki, embarking on a complete network rebuild from the ground up. The comprehensive deployment of Meraki Cloud-Managed network devices established a highly resilient, unified, and entirely cloud-managed infrastructure for seamless connectivity.
This powerful foundation provides unparalleled visibility and control. Today, Flame's IT team efficiently manages over 1200 devices across campus from a single, intuitive Meraki dashboard. Everything is visible through this dashboard, including health, alerts, device status, access policies, and identity-based segmentation. This entire network is managed by a small team of only six people. This centralized control delivers an impressive 99.9% network uptime, virtually eliminating disruptions, and provides the agility for rapid scalability to accommodate future growth.
A pivotal reason for choosing Meraki was its robust OpenAPI, which offered essential flexibility. This allowed Flame the ability to develop and integrate custom applications directly atop their network infrastructure. A significant use case of this flexibility is their automation of student attendance tracking by using student device check-ins, a feature seamlessly enabled by Cisco Meraki's Open API and integrated with their own syslog server. This advanced capability also allowed the university to build smart campus features like a 3D navigation system and signages based on the Meraki network, enhancing the overall campus experience.
Ultimately, this reliable infrastructure feels truly invisible and future-ready, allowing faculties to focus on teaching, and students to focus on learning, collaborating, and innovating. This comprehensive digital transformation has profoundly enhanced the overall educational experience, significantly empowered the university with reliable infrastructure, and fundamentally ensured that technology now “just works,” allowing the community to focus on learning and innovation.
