In our recent Favorite Network Switches for Surveillance 2015 survey, one member mentioned Meraki, now a Cisco company, as their favorite.
Meraki's big claim is cloud-based management of their switches, security appliances, and WAPs. So for offsite monitoring and configuration, you don't need to set up remote access.
They are more expensive than the typical Cisco switch used in surveillance, though. An 8 port PoE switch is about $850 online. A 300 series PoE switch is about $240.
So the question:
Are there specific deployments this would be more suited to? Or is the answer a simple "no"?