Taking Brand Engagement to the Next Level with an Advanced Network

The majority of restaurants say that improving customer digital engagement is a top technology priority. As restaurants look to leverage networks and end-to-end connectivity to connect to guests and employees, what security considerations must be put in place? COURTNEY RADKE: Most companies are currently engaged in or planning for digital transformation efforts, however, many businesses fail to consider the security implications during the initial strategy development phase. This leads to increased cyber security risks, greater threat of customer data loss, and a significantly larger attack surface. Creating the different avenues that allow customers to reach and interact with your business is similar to building streets in that it’s much easier (and cheaper) to achieve safe and efficient traffic flow when properly planned for from the outset. Security must come first. How do omni-channel strategies necessitate different security procedures? What steps should restaurants take to make sure they mitigate risks? COURTNEY RADKE: As digital sales growth continues, traditional brick-and-mortar retailers are in a race to be more accessible; but this comes with a catch. Malicious actors now have more opportunities than ever to profit from an industry that was already a main target for cyber-attacks. Companies must work to reduce risk by shrinking their attack surface through AI-driven breach prevention and automated operations, orchestration and response. This enables organizations to overcome the growing cybersecurity skills gap, creating new value with digital transformation without compromising security for business agility. How can restaurants use guest Wi-Fi to gather insights, without opening themselves up to risk? What should restaurants ask of their providers? COURTNEY RADKE: When properly deployed and configured, guest Wi-Fi networks provide customers and restaurants many loyalty and experience boosting benefits, however, when done incorrectly, Wi-Fi networks can introduce unnecessary risks and cause long-term brand harm. While there are many steps restaurateurs should take to ensure they are providing a secure Wi-Fi experience, three are critical. 1. Always use a captive portal that requires users to accept terms & conditions and links to other social data points to ease adoption and gather valuable data; 2. Restrict access using web and application filtering; 3. Proper segmentation from your business-critical networks and private data. What should restaurants understand of SD-WAN/SD-Branch to understand benefits? COURTNEY RADKE: Aside from the obvious benefit of immediately lowering WAN OPEX and CAPEX, there are numerous benefits to SD-WAN/SD-Branch strategy beyond those savings. As more workloads are migrated to the cloud, businesses are realizing traditional networks are not architected to achieve maximum efficiency. By moving to an SD-WAN solution, businesses gain greater agility and responsiveness versus back-hauling traffic through hubs or HQ sites; thus, increasing the performance of their applications and services. Additionally, an SD-Branch solution ensures devices share intelligence with one another to provide robust edge-to-edge security that enterprise WANs have historically not been able to provide.

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