Secure SASE for Hospitality

Hotels, convention facilities, food, and travel services that cater to the needs of businesses and individuals have been rapidly deploying new services and applications over the Internet. The goal is to provide more convenient registration, travel arrangements, high-speed network access to guests, seamless service purchases, and improve other aspects of their business operations.

Customer Service Depends on Reliable Connectivity

While technological innovations have brought about extraordinary cost and efficiency benefits, they are also introducing significant management, performance, and security challenges.

What is the most important business driver for a multi-chain restaurant? Food? The answer is not even about the food or ambiance. The most important element is the connectivity. What if, in today’s ultra-connected world, a multi-site restaurant could not last 15 minutes without connectivity? When the network goes down, business stops, plain and simple.

The entire restaurant and hospitality operations is dependent on connectivity. Without connectivity, it becomes very difficult for the employees to process transactions and move customers out of the door, for servers to communicate with the kitchen staff. All the organizations nowadays process orders digitally, and if the network is down, the team must resort to the paper-based ordering system and process. Also, when the connectivity is lost, organizations will have to resort to accepting payments without credit card authorization, which is risky, or accept cash, which is bad for the business, or call to authorize each card transaction, which is time-consuming.

In a survey of more than 2,000 Americans, U.S. Bank found that people aren’t carrying a lot of cash with them, and, when they do, they aren’t spending much. Overall, 50 percent of respondents said they carry cash with them less than half of the time they are out. When they do carry it, 76 percent say they keep less than $50 on hand, and nearly half say they keep less than $20.

About 46 percent say they use cashless than eight days each month, and 5 percent say they never use it.

Hospitality companies realize the many benefits of using the internet to streamline services, share information and communicate with their customers. Users of these online services must have immediate access, as slow and erratic performance or inability to quickly access information, such as hotel room availability and airline flight times can cause customers to go to a competitor.

Employees accessing applications from HQ data centers and cloud-hosted and SaaS-delivered sites need the applications to be fast, reliable, and secure. IT needs the WAN to be agile, for easy deployment and management, and to have visibility to respond to dynamic network changes.


Offering the White Glove Service with SASE

IT teams of many multi-chain restaurants, SPA, and hotels are now pursuing Secure SD-WAN to take a stand against network failures. As hospitality organizations embark on digital transformation to create better experiences for guests, partners and drive better business outcomes, a Secure SD-WAN will enable them to connect, secure, and optimize the delivery of applications and data in an era when the majority of workloads exist outside the data center.

With Secure SD-WAN, hospitality organizations can create an end-to-end software-based network architecture that delivers services to applications and data wherever they are located on a global scale with consistent, pervasive connectivity, and security.

The cost, time, and complexity of ripping out existing network infrastructure is not necessary. A Secure SD-WAN overlay can be cost-effective and deployed quickly, working in conjunction with legacy infrastructure.


 

 

Always Available Network

Secure SD-WAN offers the ability to aggregate multiple connections of any type, such as MPLS, broadband, wireless 4G, and LTE. By leveraging all available bandwidth, Secure SD-WAN makes the network agile enough to support more traffic volumes, and changing bandwidth demands. In doing so, it ensures continuous network availability and uninterrupted access to bandwidth-intensive cloud applications. Secure SD-WAN’s multiple transport link resilience also helps significantly cut down MPLS driven bandwidth costs.

 

 

High Application Performance

Secure SD-WAN architecture embeds application intelligence, enabling deep packet inspection by the network, beyond source and destination. It intelligently prioritizes application traffic based on business-intent policies and automatically directs them across the ideal transport route. This helps ensure mission-critical applications are always running smoothly, even during network outages, further improving application reliability and quality of experience. It also enables IT to spend less time dealing with network complexities and have more time and focus applied to business applications and services.

 

 

Centralized Management and Control

With centralized management and control, Secure SD-WAN dramatically simplifies WAN deployment and monitoring. Using simple, template-driven workflows, it eliminates tedious, error-prone configurations. With zero-touch deployment, IT can deploy patches, roll out policy updates, and strictly adhere to regulatory mandates across all branch locations from a single central orchestrator in one-go. Secure SD-WAN also offers deep granular visibility into applications, devices, and users to detect and fix any anomalies immediately. With a cloud-based Secure SD-WAN, hospitality organizations can quickly propagate or integrate new branches (in less than a month!), and simply plug-in to instantly connect to cloud services. By eliminating the need for manual visits to each branch location, Secure SD-WAN also saves substantial operational costs.

 

 

Secure Connectivity

Secure SD-WAN ’s segmentation enables IT to securely consolidate disparate physical environments into a single network. In doing so, they can classify applications based on business-intent and isolate the regular administrative traffic from guest WiFi traffic and traffic related to food services. Additionally, Secure SD-WAN also integrates end-to-end multi-layer security with best-of-breed features such as next-gen firewall, encryption, contextual awareness, and more. These deeper security capabilities allow hospitality organizations to steer away from data center backhauling of cloud traffic, and instead directly access cloud data and applications, without fearing security risks.