The SecurEdge Blog

Restaurants have operated in the United States for over 200 years, after spinning off from establishments that provided both lodging and dining -- what we now know today as the hospitality industry. While restaurants aren’t exactly a bleeding edge business model, in recent years restaurant owners and operators have been increasingly turning to technology to improve the dining experience, efficiency, and profitability -- and gain a leg up on the competition.

If you manage a hotel, resort, or spa, you already have your hands full. You’re busy monitoring employee performance, analyzing how to improve service, tracking upcoming events your staff is responsible for, ensuring that events are well-managed, and following financial reports with an eye towards improving profitability. What else could someone possibly put onto your already overflowing plate? How many hats can a hospitality manager reasonably be expected to wear?

Most hotel guests have a dirty little secret: they’re addicted to WiFi.

Providing fast, reliable and secure WiFi is critical in the hospitality business. Whether you're managing the wireless network for a chain of trendy coffee shops or overseeing the infrastructure of an all-inclusive resort, having the right tools and services can not only make your job a lot easier, but improve customer satisfaction and overall success of your business. 

The Meeting’s Industry, like most industries, has changed dramatically over the last decade, as new technology has reshaped the way we communicate and share our ideas and experiences. Events like Ted Talk, Atmosphere and Comic Con, rely on fast, reliable and secure WiFi to not only meet the demands of attendees who are busy hash-tagging and live tweeting the event, but to support the presenters, event coordinators, vendors, venue hosts, and IT team who all work tirelessly to bring the event together.

Today’s travelers are tech savvy and tech reliant, and they just won’t stand for slow, unreliable WiFi at a hotel or resort. If they can’t quickly and painlessly send work emails, attend Skype meetings from their room, or stream movies on their laptops, they’ll hop on Yelp (even if they have to wait until they get home for a better WiFi connection!) and write a bad review. And worse, they’ll probably check into a different hotel on their next trip.

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?

Today’s hospitality approach is more customer-centric than ever, because most hotel and resort operators understand the negative impact that one bad Yelp or TripAdvisor review can have on customer retention and new business. On the flip side, positive online reviews drive hospitality business. In a recent article from BigHospitality, "Over 25 percent of TripAdvisor users either stayed at hotels longer, spent more, or undertook more activities as a result of using the website."

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.)

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?

What if you could harness the power of secure WiFi to reach your customers in real time and give your business a competitive advantage all at once?

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.