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Four steps to providing Wi-Fi connectivity

Wi-Fi is an important part of customer service.

Travelers want to respond to work emails while waiting for their flight to board. Sports fans crave the ability to live-stream the Hail Mary pass from the big game at a packed stadium. Diners enjoy reviewing restaurants on Yelp while they’re waiting for the check. Tourists can’t resist posting Instagram pictures from city landmarks.

Fortunately, advances in Wi-Fi technology allow companies, municipalities, and other entities to deliver immersive, unforgettable experiences to people’s mobile devices.

It’s crucial to remember that commercial-grade Wi-Fi networking equipment is mandatory for connecting large groups of people. Residential-quality gear doesn’t have the security, configuration options, and management controls for access points and switches built for business use.

Moreover, you need an experienced technical partner that understands the complexities of broadcasting the Internet over a wide area to masses of people. At CBTS, we’ve implemented advanced Wi-Fi solutions in places like college dormitories, airport terminals, hospitals, and public shopping districts.

These are four fundamental steps we’ve discovered while helping our clients implement high-quality Wi-Fi networks:

1. Prioritize the quantity, quality, and configuration of access points

Wi-Fi access points (APs) use radio waves to broadcast the Internet over a defined area. They must have the capacity to deliver a fast connection to large volumes of users, all of whom might be streaming videos or downloading large files.

When you’re designing a Wi-Fi network, you need to ensure that APs are placed in strategic locations that beam the Internet into areas including rooms, hallways, and stairwells. You need to scout out dead spots and tweak your configuration to shrink or eliminate them.

Interference from other APs is a constant concern. Indeed, if you install too many APs, you can actually degrade people’s download speeds. You can also pick up interference from nearby businesses.

All these challenges underscore the need to partner with trained and certified Wi-Fi experts who know how to set up and manage the most advanced wireless networks.

2. Account for high-capacity users

High-end Wi-Fi equipment can deliver gigabit-level speeds over wireless networks. These technologies allow you to accommodate high-bandwidth users. If visitors to your business give video presentations in a meeting room or project multimedia presentations in an auditorium, they might not need a wired ethernet connection.

Today’s commercial-grade 802.11ac Wi-Fi gear has plenty of bandwidth to accommodate demanding Wi-Fi use cases. Access points can come with ethernet ports allowing you to plug in Internet of Things sensors to glean insights from network traffic and a vast array of data points.

Management software can help you tune your network to exacting specifications. Access points broadcast on 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz frequency bands. 5Ghz bands have higher speed and shorter range, while 2.4Ghz bands have slower speed and higher range. Strategic placement of APs and careful configuration of your Wi-Fi network can make the most of the options from these bands.

3. Make security a priority

Wi-Fi broadcasts have no inherent security. They’re just like using walkie-talkies: Anybody within range of an AP can listen in. These are key ways to enhance Wi-Fi network security:

  • Password-protect your network and encrypt broadcasts.
  • Segregate and isolate users so they have no way to access other areas of your network.
  • Create multiple authorization levels to tightly control who goes where on your Wi-Fi network.
  • Create login screens and unique identifiers that ensure only authorized users access your Wi-Fi.
  • Educate your users about protecting their data while using Wi-Fi.

Wireless technology providers are getting more serious about security all the time. They’re creating more options to thwart hackers without ruining the user experience of everyday online travelers.

4. Partner with an experienced enterprise Wi-Fi developer  

Whether your Wi-Fi-connected customers number in the dozens or the thousands, you need an experienced partner to pair you with the technologies that match your precise needs.

CBTS has deep wireless experience across a breadth of industries and technologies. Joining forces with Aruba Networks, the HPE enterprise wireless experts, we’ve helped a host of clients turbocharge their Wi-Fi offerings. Recent projects:

  • Providing free Wi-Fi in multiple shopping areas throughout Greater Cincinnati.
  • Upgrading APs and improving bandwidth in college dormitories.
  • Giving a local hospital the capacity to connect up to 30 wireless devices in patient rooms.
  • Delivering world-class Wi-Fi access to a hub airport.

For an in-depth account, check out how we gave a Midwest hub airport the capacity to provide Wi-Fi to everybody in the terminals on the busiest travel days. Download the free case study here.

 

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UCaaS roadmap requires support from stakeholders

This is the third in a three-part series sharing our tips for creating your unified communications roadmap. Check out the first installment – “UCaaS roadmap starts with deep assessment”, and the second installment – “UCaaS roadmap continues with process analysis”.

Auditing your hardware and mapping your processes form the foundation of a transition to Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS). But there’s one more step you cannot afford to neglect: securing stakeholder buy-in for transition.

Stakeholders can be a variety of people in your organization—top executives, middle-managers, team leads, clients, and external vendors. Getting them excited about unified communications can encourage adoption of the technologies and win over skeptics who are resistant to change.

Here are five ways to help secure stakeholder buy-in for UCaaS:

1. Educate your staff on the benefits of the new solution

Start in the executive suite. Even if they approved your new UC solution, leadership might need an extra round of persuasion to encourage everybody who works for them to embrace the new services. If they get excited about UC, the solution stands a much better chance of catching on with everybody else.

Have another demo ready for managers, outlining the specific benefits for their teams and the new work processes. Point out intuitive features and advanced processes that help people collaborate. Make it easy for all leaders to get their staffs excited about UC.

2. Provide formal training

Everybody needs an opportunity to learn how the system works before it goes live. Tailor your training to specific roles. Your warehouse staff probably doesn’t

need the same depth of training as your customer-service reps. Your UCaaS partner should have all the tools, resources, and documentation to support your training efforts.

3. Make sure everyone can access training materials after implementation

Your team will discover the limits of their training the first day on the job. The primary limit is their natural tendency to forget what they’ve learned when the system goes live.

Make sure everyone knows where to access training and resources. Make sure your vendor has a guide that includes lessons from training and step-by-step instructions to walk employees through all the new features. And make experts available for a few weeks to help people who feel stuck.

4. Clarify any changes to working practices

A cloud-based UC system allows people to work anywhere with an Internet connection. That gives you an opportunity to create work-at-home options for your staff. Will this option be available to your staff?

5. Think beyond your workforce

The collaborative features of UC can streamline your work with vendors, partners, suppliers, and clients.

Set aside time to bring them up to speed on features like text messaging, video conferencing, and integration with CRM software. The last thing you want to do is allow a technology transition that alienates your core external audiences.

Everybody needs to feel invested in your new UC tools

Your cloud-hosted UC system can help you unleash innovation in every corner of your organization, and extend it to all the people who make your business possible. Stakeholder buy-in for UCaaS is pivotal to making it happen.

CBTS engineers have put together a guide to unified communications in the cloud. Download our Guide to Start Your Cloud Communications Journey and start your transition today.

 

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UC journey begins with three steps

UC journey begins with three steps

You see the potential of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) to transform your business. A single cloud-based platform for voice, video, and text communications enables all of your people to connect on any Internet-connected device at any time, in any location. The same applies to collaborations with your vendors and suppliers.

Whether you have a legacy PBX system or an on-premises UC platform, you need a comprehensive plan to migrate your communications to the cloud. It’s an intricate process with dozens of interrelated parts that must be configured to work in unison.

Indeed, the complexity of the transition creates a strong argument for partnering with a UCaaS provider to coordinate the move and manage all the new technology after implementation.

Three key steps to UCaaS explained

Planning your move starts with three principal stages: A system audit, an assessment of investment opportunities, and business preparations. Here’s a quick look at all three:

Stage 1: Audit your current communications system

It’s critical to avoid disruptions when your new system goes live. Therefore, you must document every current feature, application, device, and hardware component. The audit looks for things including:

  • Phone lines and extensions
  • Contact information
  • CRM system integration
  • High-demand services that people use every day
  • Low-demand services that you might not have to migrate
  • Employees’ mobile devices and numbers
  • User profiles, including permissions and log-in credentials

Be sure to review the location of every piece of equipment. You need an accurate inventory of what you have and where you have it.

Your audit will vary widely depending on the type of migration. If you’re transitioning from an antiquated PBX system, your audit could be a reasonably simple assessment of current hardware and services.

If, however, you’re migrating to an enterprise UC system to the cloud, you’ll have to ensure that a vast assortment of services, software, and devices dovetail successfully. That’s a much bigger job that typically requires the services of an experienced UCaaS provider like CBTS.

Stage 2: Identify investment opportunities

UCaaS presents a wealth of choices that you must assess carefully to identify the most lucrative opportunities. Popular UC services include:

  • Video conferencing. Video can unlock limitless collaboration and customer service opportunities for your organization.
  • Collaboration tools. App-centric services that allow teams to meet, message, call, whiteboard, and share.
  • Contact center. If your current customer support system is overwhelmed, you may need advanced contact center features to help more customers and ease the strain on your staff.
  • Presence capability. If you need to know the physical location of staff members, then presence capability can enable it.
  • Every device is a network endpoint that generates data. Every app provides further insights. Software to visualize all these data sources can help you figure out who is generating the most sales and which support calls leave customers the most satisfied, for instance.

You may feel like a kid in a candy store if you’re new to UC. It’s important to understand that each app, feature, and device has pros and cons; you must establish priorities for the services that seem most promising. Perform a cost-benefit analysis of different features.

Stage 3: Prepare your business

Launching a new phone system can generate chaos across your business. You don’t want your executives fumbling through new features in front of prospective clients. And, of course, you want the transition to be invisible to customers. Keep the following in mind:

  1. A cloud migration is the ideal time to replace or refresh equipment that’s been online a few years.
  2. A phased implementation can help work out the bugs with a minimum of risk. Start with departments or divisions where downtime and confusion have less serious consequences.
  3. Test your system thoroughly in advance and try to replicate the migration process as closely as possible.
  4. Get early stakeholder buy in. If executives and supervisors start preparing their team early for the transition, there should be less confusion and chaos when the transition day arrives.
  5. Thoroughly train all employees. The more people know about the system before it goes live, the fewer problems you’ll have.
  6. Provide thorough documentation. When processes and techniques are written down, there’s less risk of problems ensuing because a crucial person is on vacation or has left the company.
  7. Inform vendors and suppliers. Take time to determine how you can integrate your UC system with their systems.

Your migration will have iterations. You can’t anticipate every problem or please every customer during the transition. But careful planning and preparation can anticipate and eliminate most problems.

With UCaaS, you’ll never go it alone

Running UC in the cloud requires in-depth training, experience, and certifications across a broad range of technologies and disciplines. That’s more trouble than a lot of companies want to embrace.

These complications underscore the appeal of UCaaS from CBTS: Our experts decode all the details and make everything assimilate so your employees, customers, partners, and vendors enjoy seamless digital communications. And it doesn’t end at implementation—CBTS stays with you every step of the way through management, maintenance, and 24x7x365 support.

Download our free eGuide to start your journey today.

Startup leverages UC solution for growth

Every organization wants the advantages of unified communications (UC) technologies like video conferencing, team chatting, advanced analytics, and custom calling.

Perhaps it’s a one-woman consultancy conducting real-time conferences with clients on another continent. Or, maybe it’s a 25-seat tech startup using a rich suite of cloud-computing apps and tools. Then again, it could be a 200-employee software company integrating sophisticated call-center technology with an advanced CRM platform.

Small and midsized organizations can use UC technologies to elevate customer service and collaborate with vendors in far-flung locales. They can ensure all their employees have always-on connectivity to data and documents that help them succeed. They can give salespeople immediate access to rich customer data that help them call more prospects and land more contracts.

It all sounds fine on paper, but there’s a hitch: Most small- to mid-sized organizations don’t have the resources to corral all these technologies and fine-tune them for optimum performance. And that’s why so many partners with experts like those at CBTS, who have decades of experience configuring and managing high-end communications systems for companies of every size, in every industry.

Partnering with a UC expert has three fundamental benefits:

1. Saving money

UC systems must be designed, purchased, installed, and tested. Servers, switches, phones, mobile apps, PCs, tablets, and other components must be carefully coordinated and customized to meet a company’s precise business needs. Then, somebody needs to monitor, manage, and update the system.

For years, these hurdles discouraged smaller organizations from investing in UC technologies. They simply couldn’t afford the time, payroll, and equipment costs. Moreover, they did not want to deal with the distraction from their core business goals.

The advent of cloud technologies shifted this paradigm. Today, managed services experts like those at CBTS can deliver all these capabilities to just about any organization — all for a predictable monthly fee. CBTS partners gain access to best-in-class technologies and pay only for the resources they use. The CBTS advanced team of certified experts handle all the hardware, software, and security patches.

2. Scaling to meet business growth

A traditional PBX and phone network requires companies to purchase additional handsets, servers, and bandwidth capacity when their business grows. But if economy contractions or marketplace changes make these tools redundant, companies get stuck with plenty of old equipment that nobody wants.

Seasonal businesses like retailers that land most of their sales around the winter holidays might have to buy enough technology to handle their busiest shopping days, then let all those tools collect dust the rest of the year.

With UC hosted in the cloud and managed by a third-party provider, companies can scale up or down quickly, limit their costs to actual usage, and stop worrying about technology becoming obsolete the day they install it. And they can leave the intricate technical details to experts who can quickly adapt a company’s technology to its current needs.

3. Making better use of your people’s time

If you’re unfamiliar with a technology, you can tie up hours, days, and weeks tweaking settings and patching software—and still end up with subpar performance. By contrast, certified, well-trained technology experts can fix problems and improve outcomes quickly because they’ve solved the same issues a dozen times before.

The complexity of UC technologies requires people with years of experience and a passion for squeezing maximum performance out of hardware and software. The question is whether your business can afford to devote time and payroll to areas outside your core mission.

For smaller organizations with limited resources, it makes much more sense to keep your employees focused on your biggest business challenges and to leave the technical work to UC experts who can optimize performance at a lower cost.

Case study: CBTS helps distiller focus on growth

A Northern Kentucky distillery is tapping into the region’s boom in bourbon tourism. The startup has two dozen employees and is growing quickly after three years in business. CBTS delivers a fully hosted UC solution that helps the company stay focused on communicating with its core audience of bourbon sippers.
Read the New Riff Distillery case study here.

 

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CBTS helps governments use telehealth technology

Businesswoman showing laptop to doctor in hospital Telehealth and telemedicine aren’t new concepts, but emerging technologies and robust networks mean they can be implemented more easily and effectively.

However, there are still challenges to adoption and effective deployment, especially for government-supported initiatives. Key hurdles include budget constraints, siloed IT departments, and organizational structures that traditionally haven’t had to work together. To solve these problems, governments at all levels, in collaboration with community organizations, are turning to their technology partners.

Tim Lonsway, Regional Director at CBTS, works with many state and regional governments to adopt telehealth and telemedicine technologies. Adoption is growing, but there are still growing pains.

What is the state of telehealth today, and what’s driving it compared with a decade ago?

There’s private healthcare, but there are also hooks all over the place with education, higher education, and then, of course, government activity, because governments have hospitals. They do healthcare activities and health services. There are other opportunities such as addiction services and corrections facilities care for individuals, and even out into rural K-12 schools, where it’s hard to get nurses.

There are federal or state requirements that require a certain amount of capabilities to service the constituents of a given community. It’s exemplified by the fact that the federal government is funding certain programs to implement telehealth solutions into those rural areas to provide some additional help, or even in urban deserts where it’s difficult to attract and maintain a workforce.

What are some of the newer technologies that are helping deliver on these mandates?

It can be as simple as a laptop with a camera, a microphone, and an internet connection. But you still need the software and the software packages behind the scenes. You must document changes because ultimately there are compliance rules. Hospitals do a lot of collaboration and sharing of information, and they leverage a lot for training.

It’s really the ability to use, store, and share anything over a distance. You’re taking your entire hospital capabilities and putting them in the palm of your hand with mobile devices, laptops, and tablets.

Are there still technological challenges given the bandwidth available to remote communities, or do we have all the pieces?

The pieces are there. It’s the distribution of the capabilities that is always going to be a challenge, and the consistencies of the deployments. There are other technologies that may suck away bandwidth from those mission-critical life-saving activities. And then it’s the deployment of the individual technologies. Do the applications feed back properly into the various systems? Did you deploy the technology properly so it’s sustainable and supportable?

And you go into some of these smaller areas with these great ideas, like with K-12s, where you’re putting big kinds of multiple video box, all-in-one monitor, speaker, camera, keyboard, into a school, and the technology just sits there. And then, of course, there’s the quality of the individual implementations once you get out to remote and rural areas.

What are the key challenges for governments looking to support telehealth aside from budget constraints?

The biggest challenge is multiple governments or entities or agencies. Better end user services are different than mental health and addictive services, for example. It’s different than youth corrections facilities or adult corrections facilities. You not only have administrators and policy makers at the top, but your technologists within each of those silos. They all have different challenges and they create their own organizations. There’s lots of overlap. But those are starting to consolidate. It’s about the money, but it’s also about the inefficiencies of how the money gets allocated and distributed to deploy technology.

How are governments looking to technology partners like CBTS to solve these challenges?

The trend away from doing individual siloed work has really been going on for about 10 years, and has gotten a lot of traction over the last five or six years. The IT partner comes in and says, “We’ll take those basic infrastructure services off your plate. We’ll worry about compliance and adoption and availability, security vulnerabilities, bandwidth constraints, computing constraints, resource management, all that stuff. You can focus on the business of treating cases or educating students or whatever it is you might be doing.”

That’s really where the partnerships come together. They help governments focus further upstream and break down those silos.

How beneficial are emerging technologies and “as-a-Service” models for deploying them?

In these environments, they may or may not have an enterprise network. Plain internet connections aren’t secure or robust enough to handle the traffic. The ability to leverage software-defined networks to prioritize the traffic and create what looks like an enterprise network meshes it all together and creates the right environment.

Network-as-a-Service or compute-as-a-service, storage-as-a-service, SD-WAN, even wireless LAN-as-a-service enables organizations to basically create line items on their monthly invoice at a consumption level. You can predict it, you can plan for it, you can budget it. Those types of services are tremendous for government. The adoption of partnerships are there and they’re continuing to expand and grow.

Reds, CBTS partner to leverage NaaS

Network as a Service (NaaS) technology isn’t typically associated with Opening Day and baseball, but with the 2018 season now under way, it’s a great time for us to share details about a technology partnership between CBTS and the Cincinnati Reds.

The Reds are leveraging the CBTS NaaS solution, built on Cisco Meraki technology, to create pop-up networks at each of the team’s minor league facilities and Spring Training facility that are accessible through Meraki’s Auto Virtual Private Network technology.

This technology allows Reds Front Office executives and scouts to watch players in real time at any one of the team’s locations across the United States. In previous years, Reds officials had to wait for videos of players to be transmitted digitally, which is an inefficient, time-consuming and expensive process.

CBTS provides monitoring, management of NaaS

Video conferencing Hosted Enterprise UC

CBTS sourced the necessary Internet connectivity at each Reds location, deployed the solution, and provides 24/7/365 monitoring and management of the network. CBTS’ NaaS solution is secure, flexible, and will scale to meet the team’s future needs.

“MLB is an extremely competitive landscape, and leveraging NaaS technology from CBTS will give the Reds an important edge as we work to develop top talent and scout across our organization,” said Brian Keys, Vice President of Technology at the Cincinnati Reds, in a release announcing the partnership.

Click here to learn more about Network as a Service from CBTS.

 

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CBTS helps clients drive business outcomes  

CBTS helps clients drive business outcomes through the right technology products and services.

These business outcomes don’t just include financial goals. Healthcare providers, for example, consider providing value-based care a critical business outcome as they move away from volume-based models of care.

Healthcare has experienced massive consolidation over the past decade, a trend that is taxing internal IT resources. CBTS is partnering with several large healthcare organizations that, after growing through a series of mergers and acquisitions, are managing disparate voice technologies across multiple locations.

These organizations need a cost-efficient, holistic solution that meets their current needs, scales for future growth, and gives their internal IT organizations bandwidth to focus on value-added initiatives.

CBTS is there to help drive these specific desired business outcomes.

The Case in Point

CBTS recently implemented a Cisco-based Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solution for a major regional healthcare organization with $5.6 billion in assets and 33,000 employees. This organization is the largest healthcare provider in the State of Ohio, and has hospitals and physician offices throughout Ohio and Kentucky.

Ultimately, the client had to replace a mix of outdated PBX systems that it inherited through a series of acquisitions, and move to a single UCaaS solution for all locations. The solution also required improved quality of service (QoS) for voice calling, supporting the quick addition of new properties, meeting compliance requirements, and supporting teleconferencing and other apps that are essential to improving the patient experience.

Business woman and doctor

A Fully Managed Healthcare Solution

CBTS recommended a hosted, fully managed voice solution in this case to support the client’s desired business outcomes and IT resource needs.

With this solution now in place, the rapidly growing healthcare provider can focus its internal IT resources on value-added initiatives while CBTS manages its voice network, which must be available 24x7x365 to support continuous patient care.

CBTS also is managing the client’s migration from legacy PBX to new VoIP systems on a site-to-site basis. Currently, the older equipment and new UCaaS systems are centrally managed from the CBTS Enterprise Network Operations Center (ENOC).

The CBTS solution also supports TelePresence Video Centers now available across acute care facilities throughout the client’s healthcare network for videoconferencing among medical practitioners. After an initial rollout at 50 sites, new units are being added on a gradual basis.

CBTS staff at the ENOC also administers a Cisco Emergency Responder (CER), which works with the Cisco phone system to enhance 911 calling. CER is designed to ensure calls are routed to the correct Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) for the caller’s location, and that emergency calls are returned if necessary. The emergency response system also tracks phone locations.

A number of integration points are included in the network for easy addition of third-party healthcare apps.

People Power, Too

Engineering expertise is necessary to fully leverage this innovative technology.  CBTS deployed two dozen employees to the client’s network sites – including project managers, design architects, and implementation and design engineers – along with approximately 40 professional consultants specializing in various aspects of this project.

This is what we mean when we say CBTS helps our clients drive business outcomes.

CBTS has extensive experience working with multi-site health care organizations on their voice application needs. Want to learn more about this ongoing healthcare IT initiative? Read the case study here.

CBTS offers broad expertise across practices

The IT professionals at CBTS have broad expertise across multiple practices: Communications, Cloud Services, Infrastructure Solutions, and Consulting Services. This allows CBTS to engineer and implement solutions that are tailored to meet customer needs.  

CBTS clients include Fortune 20 and Forbes Global 2000 companies. We serve organizations in all verticals, including Education, where we recently demonstrated our broad expertise and customized approach with client Morehead State University (MSU).  

MSU serves nearly 11,000 undergraduate and graduate students from 41 states and 31 countries, and operates a main campus and regional campuses throughout eastern Kentucky. MSU engaged CBTS while moving to a universal communications infrastructure that integrates voice, video, and data. The solution also reduces costs across MSU’s five branches. 

MSU invested in a cloud-enabled collaborative communications system from Cisco, which CBTS fully manages.  

Lower Costs for Voice Calling  

The new solution allowed MSU to move from an antiquated analog PBX system into the Hosted Enterprise Unified Communications (UC) solution from CBTS, which features a utility based pricing model and consistent experience across MSU’s footprint. The solution includes 1,500 Cisco handsets with charges billed per phone on a monthly basis, which creates a predictable pricing model. 

This solution is also driving more collaboration and greater productivity among MSU’s faculty and other staff.  

Woman at computer

Additional Collaborative Tools 

Hosted Enterprise UC from CBTS features a full suite of unified communication apps from Cisco, including telephony, messaging, softphone, instant messaging (IM) and presence, video, conferencing, and more.  

CBTS also incorporated a centralized SIP trunking system for MSU, which provides a secure digital PBX environment. Other components include a call manager and call centers. CBTS provided all network design, installation, training, and monitoring for the unified cloud infrastructure, and handles remote monitoring and management. 

MSU is just one example of how we have broad expertise throughout the IT landscape.  There are many more examples like this with other technologies such as cloud, consulting and infrastructure. 

Want to discover more about the fully managed networks at MSU? Read the case study here. 

 

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NaaS Is the Future of Food Service Networking

Food service customers have long memories, and they love to tell family and friends about their experiences—good and bad. Even when the memory of a delicious meal starts to fade, they remember the quality of the customer service. That’s why savvy food service owners evaluate their point of sale (POS) systems just as carefully as they evaluate their menus to ensure each part of the system, such as payment transactions, inventory management, and sales applications, serves their mission and their bottom line.

From Legacy to NaaS
Even the most knowledgeable food service owners face increasing costs and thin margins, showing the importance of having the best networks in place to maximize the benefits and justify the costs of POS systems. Food services are transitioning from legacy network systems to the Network as a Service (NaaS) model in increasing numbers, primarily because NaaS addresses the need for dependable Wi-Fi and network security at a price that doesn’t fluctuate each month.

Network as a Service with SD-WAN
CBTS recently added Network as a Service with software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) , a solution that offers food service owners the kind of reliability and business-computing power they currently need with the flexibility to grow in the future as their businesses expand.

SD-WAN Is a Cost-Saving Powerhouse
Based on Cisco’s Meraki technology, SD-WAN technology provided by CBTS maximizes the automatic provisioning of important network security components—such as firewalls—faster and at a fraction of the expense of conventional bandwidth services. Additionally, SD-WAN’s ability to connect remotely to multi-location businesses gives owners powerful flexibility in addressing the specific needs of different locations, such as providing secure guest Wi-Fi.  Owners can also leverage their marketing power by tapping into the strategies offered by NaaS location analytics.

Furthermore, CBTS’ tech engineering team provides expertise that food service owners can rely on to ensure their NaaS systems work seamlessly. This eliminates the costly expenses of hiring IT consultants or maintaining in-house staff to handle network systems.

Utility Pricing for Cost Reductions with No Surprises
The NaaS utility-pricing model effectively manages present and future costs. Benefits include:

  • Monthly fixed costs for equipment and management
  • No capital investments for expensive network equipment
  • No technology obsolescence worries (hardware refreshing is built into the solution lifecycle)
  • Better performance than legacy systems at a lower cost

24/7 Expert IT Technical Support
CBTS’ IT team specializes in enterprise-level technology. They handle the ins and outs of the network infrastructure, and this allows food service owners to put their network worries in the hands of a team fully equipped to monitor networks and troubleshoot around the clock.

With CBTS’ world-class business operations managing their networks, owners can concentrate on leveraging the power of NaaS to scale operations at their desired pace without increasing costs by adding new users or new locations to individual networks. It’s a win-win proposition that food services can’t afford to ignore and customers are sure to notice. Migrate from expensive MPLS to robust Network as a Service with SD-WAN.

Learn about Network as a Service and SD-WAN from CBTS.

 

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