Why Wi-Fi as a Service?

 In today’s digital world, when everyone utilizes mobile devices, your company’s Wi-Fi network plays a far bigger role than it has in the past. End-users on your network no longer have the luxury of waiting a few hours – or days – for their computer hardware, operating system, software application, or network connection to be fixed.

 Regardless of whether you operate in retail, hospitality, education, manufacturing, distribution, healthcare, professional services, or something else different. If your company’s wireless network goes down, it will harm its brand, alienate customers, and cause financial loss.

 Yes, Wi-Fi is now just as important as utility power, running water, heating, and air conditioning for most businesses.

 As a result, it’s even more important to make your Wi-Fi as fast, dependable, and safe as possible. However, for organizations with a small internal IT team, this can be difficult.

 In this blog post, you’ll discover six reasons why smaller IT teams struggle to fix Wi-Fi issues, as well as what you can do about it. (This is especially important if you work on a small IT team or head a company with a Wi-Fi network backed by a small IT team):

 1) End-user expectations for 100 percent uptime and immediate response are rising.

 Google, Facebook, YouTube, Uber, Netflix, Airbnb, Spotify, and Amazon Prime have revolutionized the way people behave and expect things.  The Experience Economy is upon us.  You will be judged by your Wi-Fi and the way applications perform on your Wi-Fi Network. 

 The new standard is instant satisfaction.  Everything is judged by the UX(User Experience) Amazon invested over a billion dollars to reduce the time it takes for most Amazon Prime deliveries in the United States from two to one day. This changed what consumers expected and caused WalMart or other to upgrade their supply chains to catch up.

 Forget about the days when people were willing to stand in line for 10 or 20 minutes at the grocery store to check out. Or waiting in a 20-minute line to get tickets at the movie theater.

 The expectations for the UX are huge and keeping up can feel overwhelming to most companies and to make things more complex employees now expect a consumer like experience.  In the words of Vercuca Salt, “I want it now!”

 So how do small IT teams keep up and meet the demands of their end-users?

 Year ago a user would call their help desk, report a problem, and be perfectly OK waiting anywhere from a few hours to a day or two for the problem to be fixed.

 Now when a user’s tablet, laptop, or PC won’t log in these days, the dialogue goes something like this: “Hey Steve! My iPhone’s Wi-Fi connection was lost once more. I can’t do my work without it, so send someone over here in the next 10 minutes or I’ll lose it —- or at the least, call your manager.”

 Expectations have shifted and 99.9% uptime and quick gratification are unfortunately expected.  It’s a bad time to be on an internal IT team that is chronically understaffed, overworked, and underpaid.

 2) Increasing Requirements for Applications

 As a Gen X’er I have seen it all.  Things used to be easy and applications with on a few 5.25 Floppy diskettes and you didn’t have to worry much about patches and updates. 

 A single, relatively low-resolution snapshot taken on one of today’s popular Android or iPhone smartphones was about the size of a popular word processing program or spreadsheet application. At most, a few megabytes.

 Have we ever seen a software upgrade, or a mobile OS upgrade, which we all know happens all the time now, that actually has lower system requirements than the prior generation?

 Sure, some programs and operating systems improve over time.

 However, demands on memory, bandwidth, and latency — all of which end users take for granted — continue to rise with no end in sight.

 When it comes to addressing their Wi-Fi issues, tiny IT teams must contend with ever-increasing application needs.

 3) Increasing Security Requirements

 Nobody wakes up thinking that their company’s Wi-Fi network, or the organization, is about to be the target of a cyber-attack.

 It seems like a well-publicized security breach, ransomware attack, or denial of service incident takes down a popular website virtually every day. Alternatively, a high-value information database might be dumped on the dark web in its entirety, as plain text.

 How does a tiny IT staff keep their company’s network secure while also attending to all of their supported end-users’ competing needs?

 It doesn’t have to be a psychotic angry ex-employee or a state-sponsored terrorist on the other side of the world. It may just be a desperate competitor that paid a geeky teenager to sniff for passwords into your most vital databases using a protocol analyzer on your open Wi-Fi network.

 How does a tiny IT team cope with ever-increasing security requirements? It’s not a simple task!

 4) Multiple Locations

 So, what happens if three of your facilities within 30 minutes due to a hurricane or some other event knocking out power.  While you’re gathering information and getting ready to get in your car, the roof of the primary location you’re leaving begins to leak, causing a flood in your computer room and shorting out all of your network infrastructure devices.

 So you’ve got four sites and 376 end-users sitting on their hands, alienating customers, ruining your company’s brand, and blaming the IT department.

 Where do you begin to determine whether these are Wi-Fi hardware failures? Could some remote tier 2 troubleshooting by a trained technician bring one or more of these sites back in a matter of minutes?

 Again, this is incredibly difficult for a small IT team to accomplish in a timely manner that meets real business demands and minimizes damage.

 5) You don’t have the extra staff to support disasters.

 You’ve been caught off guard because of the hurricane and the weather didn’t check with you to see if their arrival would be convenient for your tiny IT crew. Why?

 Your sole other member of your IT team, a young network administrator, is sick with the flu and won’t be back for at least another three or four working days.

 And you were supposed to go fishing with your father on Saturday, only two days away, and need to be frantically rushing around dealing with packing for your fishing trip, picking up your father, and getting the boat ready.  You are entitled to have a life – right?

 You’ve obviously opted to be part of a small IT team. So, at least for now, having a life outside of your job isn’t in the cards. You’ll have a hard time telling your father that you need to cancel when we has been looking forward to the trip.  .

 6) Your team doesn’t really have Enterprise Wi-Fi experience. 

 Finally, and most importantly, here’s the real kicker. Wi-Fi was regarded as a nice-to-have just a few years ago, rather than a need. Today, however, Wi-Fi is a vital means of primary network access.

 As the primary means of access, if your wireless network goes down, you might as well start a bonfire with your money and start shredding hundred dollar bills for most types of enterprises. Downtime is one of the most expensive events that a business can face. 

 And it gets much more problematic because most businesses impose unrealistic demands on their IT departments to support a dizzying array of applications without appropriate staffing or expertise.

 As an IT manager, you are most likely an exceptional generalist when it comes to covering your company’s most significant line of business applications as well as basic hardware and software issues.

 However, you’ve never had the opportunity to help design, deploy, and maintain enterprise Wi-Fi networks. Your management team and end-users, on the other hand, expect your Wi-Fi network to work flawlessly 100% of the time.

 So, what do you do if no one on your team has experience with corporate Wi-Fi?

 How does Wi-Fi as a Service Helps Small IT Teams Solve Wi-Fi Issues?

 With nearly 10 Million Sq Ft of Wi-Fi deployed and nearly 6 Million under active support, Mogility Networks has the tools, processes, and personnel to augment smaller IT teams.  Our team of experts can swiftly and effectively resolve even the most basic Wi-Fi network issues.

 That’s why Mogility Networks established a Wi-Fi as a Service (WaaS) subscription to assist smaller IT teams in permanently resolving their most vexing Wi-Fi issues.

 You’ll get everything you need to have a professionally designed, installed, optimized, monitored, managed, and maintained Wi-Fi network with an all-in-one Wi-Fi as a service subscription:

 Hardware as a Service (HaaS) is a concept in which hardware is provided as a service. Get the proper hardware that gives a fantastic end-user experience and makes you look amazing, based on experienced, corporate Wi-Fi design and engineering.  We use top grade hardware from Aruba, Cisco, Fortinet, Extreme Networks, and Meraki.

 SaaS (Software as a Service) — Use of both premises based and cloud-based tools and resources to manage your Wi-Fi network, such as network monitoring, guest Wi-Fi management, and weekly network health reports.

 MNS (Managed Network Services) — Get managed Wi-Fi with 24/7 network monitoring and a tier 2 support help desk.

Ability to add optional Network Access Control as a Service, Directory as a Service, and MDM(Mobile Device Management) as a Service.

 The Benefits of Managed Wi-Fi and the Shift from Capital to Operating Expenses

 Small IT teams are typically associated with helping small businesses.

 It’s not uncommon to find organizations struggle to come up with the money they need to invest effectively in modern, secure, and reliable network infrastructure when they’re failing to come up with the IT budget needed to keep their network infrastructure and end-users adequately serviced.

Managed Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi as a Service give your firm with one all-inclusive subscription, similar to how the software as a service business model altered what it meant to buy software and transitioned from large upfront payments to monthly fees.

You don’t have to worry about deciding what network hardware to buy anymore. You don’t even have to buy network hardware. You also won’t have to worry about your Wi-Fi hardware becoming obsolete because you’ll get a pre-scheduled hardware refresh to keep your network running smoothly. Your all-in-one Wi-Fi as a service subscription includes all of the necessary Wi-Fi devices.

And this is something that should make your chief financial officer grin (CFO). Why? Because you’re converting your wireless networking from a capital to an operating expense (OpEx).

 The Bottom Line: How Can Small IT Teams Solve Their Wi-Fi Issues?

 Your end-users have become increasingly reliant on their Wi-Fi network in recent years. While some things have improved in terms of reliability and ease of monitoring and management, operating a Wi-Fi network is more challenging than ever.

 We looked at six reasons why maintaining Wi-Fi is especially difficult for smaller IT teams in this blog post. You also learnt about the advantages of using a Wi-Fi as a service or managed network services subscription to solve these Wi-Fi issues.

 If you’re in charge of a tiny IT staff dealing with a lot of Wi-Fi issues and want to ensure that your supported end-users have a wonderful Wi-Fi experience, you can’t afford to ignore the issue and hope it goes away. Take the initial step in the correct direction by utilizing our services.

 In summary most IT teams can benefit from having a team of Wi-Fi specialist to keep their Wi-Fi network running smooth.  This of Wi-Fi as a Service as a utility.  Wi-Fi should be easy a trouble-free.  At Mogility Networks we pride ourselves on being one of the most experienced Wi-Fi companies in the country.  We don’t want you to just take our work for it.  We want to show you all we have to offer.  We work with companies with that simply need 2 Wi-Fi Access Points to Gov’t agencies supporting over 1000 Access Points.

 Get your free consultation by visiting www.wifiworldwide.com/contact or make an appointment at www.calendly.com/mogilityphillip

 Check out our Podcast at https://open.spotify.com/show/2SwTxgWffrppzlwak8wCyz