Case Study: Illinois College achieves seamless campus-wide connectivity and simplified IT management with Cisco Meraki

Robust connectivity and full-stack IT solutions keep Illinois College campus moving

Illinois College, a small liberal arts school in central Illinois, needed a robust, easy-to-manage network to support renovated classrooms, residence halls, a competitive eSports program, and campus safety. With a small IT team and limited budget, the college chose Cisco Meraki’s cloud-managed stack—MR access points, Meraki switches, MX security appliances, MV cameras and Meraki Systems Manager—to replace controller-based hardware and simplify operations.

Cisco Meraki delivered a full-stack solution managed from the Meraki dashboard, enabling in-house deployments that saved the college over $120,000 on a dorm Wi‑Fi rollout, mass firmware updates overnight, and centralized endpoint controls (geofencing and remote wipe). The result: dramatically fewer student Wi‑Fi support calls, a sharp drop in malware infections, zero‑lag performance for the eSports center, improved dorm security via MV cameras, and a scalable platform that continues to add features as the college grows.

Illinois College

Patrick Brown

Chief Information Officer