The SecurEdge Blog

It’s no big secret that traditional retailers are facing tough times. Every few weeks, there’s another news story appearing like this one in Business Insider declaring “More than 3,800 stores will close (this year) — here's the full list.” But what those sensational headlines don’t reveal: Last year, the U.S. retailing industry added 4,080 stores (14,248 new stores opened, while 10,168 closed).

As anyone in retail will tell you, its getting harder to get customers in the door. Online shopping provides a level of convenience that is hard to match, but don't lose heart. The discerning consumer is more interested now than ever in experiences, and providing a solid, safe, reliable guest WiFi service is one major way to create the experience your customers are looking for.   Here are 5 ways WiFi can transform your space:

When you offer Guest WiFi at your retail location, you are creating a bridge between your brand and your customers. This bridge allows for give-and-take, a mutually beneficial exchange: You provide free WiFi access for your customers, and in return, your customers provide some information about themselves (for example, their email address) to help you better understand and serve them.

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?

We get really excited when we hear from IT leaders and other key decision makers looking to learn more about WiFi as a Service. When they ask us a question, that means they’re one step closer to simplifying the way they provide secure WiFi for their business or school.

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?

Large-scale, enterprise-grade wireless networks are both complex and costly to design, install and manage over-time. Fortunately, there is a solution to these technical and budgetary challenges and it's called WiFi as a Service. In this week's episode, we reveal one of the main reasons why businesses should consider purchasing their wireless networks with a secure WiFi subscription.

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.

When does a problem become too big or too complex that you finally ask for help? Changing a light bulb is easy but who do you call when the light switch stops working? An electrician right? Sometimes there are things we can handle on our own and sometimes there are problems that are best left to the experts.