Case Study: Sweet Briar College achieves streamlined, reliable campus-wide surveillance with Cisco Meraki

How MV security cameras streamlined one sprawling college campus

Sweet Briar College, a women’s liberal arts school sprawled across 3,200 acres in rural Virginia, faced major security and monitoring challenges from its remote facilities, historic buildings, and an unwieldy ten-year-old camera system. The small IT team, led by CTO Aaron Mahler, needed a cloud-managed, easy-to-use solution that preserved campus aesthetics, reduced bandwidth strain, and solved problems like cameras going offline and complex access for staff—so they turned to Cisco Meraki and its MV security cameras.

Cisco Meraki deployed almost 70 MV cameras (MV21 and MV71) with mesh connectivity via Meraki APs, centralized cloud management through the Meraki dashboard, Motion Search, offline alerts, and granular user permissions. The result: a small campus safety team can monitor the 3,200-acre campus more effectively, staff across campus can access only their areas, installation avoided disrupting historic buildings, and the Meraki solution saved significant staff time while reducing missed footage and manual video searches.

Sweet Briar College

Aaron Mahler

Director of Network Services & Chief & Chief Technology Officer