The Hospitality Guest Experience Relies on Network Monitoring
Technology is revolutionizing hospitality. Some of it is visible to guests: robots delivering room service, voice control for in-room features, and biometric check-in. But the most important systems can’t be seen by guests at all: in-room automation adjusting environmental conditions, for example, or AI-enabled chatbots handling inquiries about reservations.
The innovation happening behind the scenes is just as important as—if not more important than—the technology present in modern-day guest rooms.
The personalization and convenience guests now expect are key for front-of-house success, but they begin with back-of-house operations. In a digital world, part of creating an unforgettable guest experience involves network monitoring.
The systems deployed in hospitality to ensure guest comfort and safety now rely on the network for monitoring and control. When these smart systems can’t connect, they can’t perform as expected. This impacts not only the guest experience but also your property’s technology investment.
Creating a truly elevated guest experience means not only using technology, such as automation, AI and virtual reality, but also doing everything possible to make sure mission-critical systems never go down—and resolving issues quickly when they arise.
How can hospitality environments accomplish this? It starts with network monitoring to ensure continuous performance, detect threats and prevent unauthorized access.
Let’s look at a few examples of network monitoring in hospitality.
Maintain Visibility and Isolate Threats
As technology becomes more integrated into every aspect of hospitality, bad actors seek out ways to attack hospitality networks, steal guest data and bring mission-critical systems down.
To defend against these disruptive and potentially dangerous events, your hotel’s IT and operations teams need to be able to proactively monitor and prevent problems. This through is made possible through strategies like network access control (NAC).
To guard your network against unauthorized users while still permitting guests and staff to gain protected access, solutions like Network Access Control software from macmon, a Belden brand, can uniquely identify and sort mission-critical devices (surveillance cameras, wireless access points and employee workstations, for example) into corresponding groups and VLANs based on predefined rules. It can also verify security compliance so you’re always up to date on patches and upgrades.
Hospitality staff will have access to the devices and data they need to do their jobs effectively, and guests can connect and collaborate for leisure or business. At the same time, NAC can discover and isolate external devices attempting to connect to prevent unsanctioned network access. It can also identify anomalies and vulnerabilities that pose a potential threat to critical systems.
With network access control in place, your technology team will gain network transparency: They’ll know exactly which devices are on the network and be able to monitor them to ensure functionality. To reduce security vulnerability and lessen the possibility of unexpected downtime caused by unauthorized users, access can be automatically granted or denied.
Gain Visibility into Network Performance
Let’s say it’s a typical, busy day at your hotel. Suddenly, one of your cameras stops working. Every second of downtime becomes a potential safety issue. You need to quickly find out why the device went down so you can get it back online.
While some hotel maintenance teams are set up to receive real-time alerts when a device malfunctions, those alerts don’t always offer insights into root-cause analysis. They indicate that a camera is down—but then what? Even though the camera is down, the device itself may not be the problem. Instead, the unexpected downtime could be caused by network congestion or cable disconnection. But how do you know for sure?
Belden Horizon software gives you everything you need to monitor, analyze and improve network performance and analytics. Specifically, Belden Horizon Network Insights (BHNI) helps you discover networking assets and analyze your network so you can gauge real-time performance and reliability.
By automatically sniffing networking data and generating insights on what it picks up (network anomalies, security and performance issues), BHNI helps you understand how your network is functioning at any time.
Through proprietary algorithms and machine learning models, the insights it generates can help you monitor and improve:
- Bandwidth and throughput
- Latency
- Network uptime
- Reliability
It also works with any vendor’s networking devices. Hospitality environments can use whatever networking equipment works best for them while still gaining access to the insights they need.
Learn More About Belden’s Hospitality Offerings
Belden constantly seeks out ways to help you make progress on your digital transformation journey.
Our unique combination of technical and hospitality expertise helps you successfully integrate technology into guest and employee experiences.
We can also simplify your project management and protect your investment by working with a single infrastructure partner. Belden offers a full suite of data acquisition, transmission, orchestration and management solutions that support every type of technology you’ll need—now and in the future.
Learn more about our hospitality capabilities.
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About the Author
Zane Blomgren is Director, Industrial Cybersecurity at Belden. With over 20 years of cyber security experience, Zane has been called on to help build foundational security controls and assist after cyberattacks have begun. Zane marries his passion for security and his interest in collaborating with and learning from a wide variety of customers to apply best practices in even the most challenging of situations to create more reliable, secure systems for organizations in sectors including energy, transportation, manufacturing and many others.