The SecurEdge Blog

The higher education IT landscape is constantly changing, especially when you’re focusing on Wi-Fi and networking. What used to be fairly straightforward, is no longer simple or one size fits all. College and University campuses are among the most demanding wireless environments in existence today.

When you think about the 2,827 public and private, four-year degree granting education institutions in the United States, that’s a lot of students, faculty, and staff! To be more precise, there are 19.9 million students attending American colleges and universities.

In this space, we have talked previously about the many challenges that come with providing WiFi on college campuses. Students live, learn, and play on campus, but they aren’t necessarily doing all three of those things at the same time and in the same place. That’s why college campuses require multiple types of WiFi designs, making them especially tricky.

Bright lights, fried food- an accompaniment to the cacophony of feet pounding on metal bleachers, the base of a wild symphony; whoops, awwws and cheers the melody, a rhythmic clapping keeping time. Whether you’re in the middle of the action or cheering from the living room, there is nothing quite as electric, as unifying, as emotional, as live sports. Football, soccer, tennis, baseball, little league or pro team, when you’re team is up, you’re a part of the experience.

College: where young minds are molded and future leaders are born. Over 20 million students will head to class this fall with laptops and devices in tow, ready for long hours spent in lecture halls and libraries and expecting lightning fast WiFi to get the job (and the occasional internet-browsing procrastination) done.

Whether it's for employees, students, guests or customers, having a secure and reliable wireless internet connection is becoming more and more a standard of quality to which a building or enterprise is measured.  

If you’re considering partnering with a company that provides managed network services—or you already have—what precisely would they be doing, and what kind of value would it bring to your business?

Retention and recruitment are more than just alliterative buzzwords for college and university leaders. Combined, they are the lifeblood of a school’s long-term success and survival. And many higher-ed leaders are realizing that technology (WiFi included) is not only becoming a mission-critical service but also the special sauce that makes their campus experience stand out from other schools, delighting students and bolstering retention and recruitment efforts.

Let’s pretend it’s Opposite Day, and you’re looking to deploy a slow, spotty, unreliable wireless network for your business or organization. You’re in luck! There are several common mistakes made by IT management and key decision makers, across all industries, when trying to implement secure WiFi. We’ve narrowed it down to the five worst. (You’re welcome.)

Meet Madison. Madison is an eighteen-year-old freshman at a mid-sized university. Madison has had a smartphone since she was thirteen. It’s an integral part of her life, the primary way she stays connected to her friends and, now that she’s away at school, to her family back home. Madison uses her phone to access every sphere of her life. It’s her primary vehicle for maintaining friendships, dating, consuming media, and sharing ideas. She feels lost without her phone. So naturally, now that she’s at college, Madison expects her phone to be by her side or in her hands no matter where she is on campus, including the lecture hall, lab, and study group. This generation of learners have grown up around smartphones, so it’s no surprise that they demand and expect their phones to play a big part in their college learning experience.

Whether you’re looking to upgrade your business’s current wireless network or implement one for the first time, you’re probably wondering what equipment you’ll need to purchase.

In the past, we have occasionally run into instances where businesses have attempted to use SOHO (Single Office, Home Office) or home networking equipment to build their office or business WiFi network. We would get a panicked call from a business owner or their IT staff asking for assistance in resolving some disaster created when it failed during a meeting, presentation or event that unfortunately cost them a ton of money $$$ and/or credibility.

No matter what industry you’re in today, you really have to provide wireless, one way or the other. As more and more applications move to the cloud, and more of your employees and guests are bringing mobile devices on to your network and expecting a fast, secure experience, WiFi is now essential to your business. If your network goes down, your business goes down—it’s that simple.

The traditional piecemeal approach to providing WiFi doesn’t meet the challenges of tomorrow, or even today for that matter. As businesses take on the challenge of WiFi planning for 2018, more and more of them will look to a turnkey subscription-based model of purchasing the hardware, software, and managed services necessary to deploy an enterprise-grade wireless network.

In Part 1, we covered the first two steps in our proprietary services process that's included with a managed WiFi subscription: analysis and design. To recap: We start by gathering all the relevant data on your wireless environment and goals. There are so many variables that can affect your wireless network design, roughly falling under these five categories: industry, coverage, devices, users, and applications. We’ll combine the information we gather from you with the data we’ve collected over the years to come up with a custom WiFi design for your environment. After the initial analysis and design legwork is done, we’re ready to deploy your wireless network!

When WiFi operates at a snail’s pace or keeps dropping, users can go from Bruce Banner to the Hulk very quickly. WiFi is now demanded, expected, and required for doing just about everything, across every industry. So, how do you deploy and support a fast, secure WiFi network that won’t make your end users turn green and smash things?

We don’t like to brag, but at SecurEdge Networks, we really have thought of everything necessary to provide you with fast, reliable, and secure WiFi. Not only that, but we’ve bundled it all together into a comprehensive monthly subscription package called SecurEdge WiFi. Okay, maybe we do like to brag a little.

Enterprise-grade WiFi is no longer a “nice-to-have” or an exclusive feature only found at large companies. Today, it’s a must-have for every size business, across every industry. However, this has created more than a few challenges. From design and installation to management and cost, wireless is not an easy utility to implement. In the video below, Philip Wegner, Founder, and CEO of SecurEdge Networks explains in detail how a subscription with SecurEdge (WiFi as a Service) solves these challenges and simplifies networking.

Most businesses and organizations are asking more of their WiFi networks than ever before: more users, ever-changing devices, bandwidth-heavy applications, and security threats are putting greater demands on WiFi. But are the wireless networks getting the TLC they deserve?

Just like devices and applications, new network security threats are popping up all the time--causing massive problems for both businesses and their end-users. One of the more notable types of malicious attacks that have dominated the headlines this year is ransomware. In this week's episode, we outline six steps that will protect your business from a ransomware attack.

When you were a kid, didn’t you hate it when adults said things like, “Sometimes you have to learn the hard way”—and they were right? Riding on the handlebars of a friend’s bike down a very steep hill while your friend pedaled furiously might have seemed like a good idea at the time, but one busted lip and lots of bruises later, you had (hopefully) learned a valuable lesson about bike safety. As a managed WiFi service provider, our goal at SecurEdge is to help businesses set up high-performing wireless networks the easy way. But sadly, many customers don’t seek help from us until they’ve already endured some painful lessons. 

Nowadays, people just expect WiFi to work—period. They don’t really care how it works, but they do expect it to always be available, be extremely fast, and always secure.

Tired of trying to answer your end-users complaints about why the WiFi is so slow and unreliable? It's a common issue for many businesses. You're asked to wear many hats and the last thing you want to deal with are the complexities that come with wireless. Unfortunately, WiFi is a mission-critical utility that you can't shrug off as a "nice-to-have". There are many reasons why your Wi-Fi network isn't performing properly, and in today's WiFi minute, I'll highlight two solutions that will drastically improve your WiFi performance.

With their snazzy bright yellow vests and tripod-mounted instruments, we’ve all seen land surveyors quietly working their scientific magic before a major construction or development project begins. They’ve been around since the Egyptians built the pyramids thousands of years ago—and those things have held up pretty well. Just like a land survey plays a critical role in planning and developing building projects, a wireless site survey is a necessary first step when designing and deploying secure WiFi. Here's why.

Without proper management of your newly upgraded or freshly deployed wireless network, the chance that you'll run into performance problems is almost guaranteed — even if you're WiFi design was configured correctly. But managing your wireless network after it's been deployed can be difficult. In this week's episode, Danny reveals the four reasons why WiFi management is so challenging today.