When it comes to wireless connectivity, you know faster is always better. What’s more, did you know that WiFi as a service (WaaS) is expected to grow to $8.4 billion by 2025?

Internet connectivity has improved where spotty coverage and internet cables are in the rear-view mirror, making managed WiFi a priority for many businesses.

Over the last 10-years, business WLAN (wireless local area network) has changed dramatically. You’re not looking at a few access points anymore; it’s complete enterprise coverage.

Stay here while we look at the six critical reasons your business should have a managed WiFi solution here.

What Is Managed WiFi?

The expansion of business wireless networks requires continual monitoring to ensure that all your employees, guests, and users get immediate and secure connections. Managed service providers need to be looped in to assure that your wireless LAN (WLAN) is up and running.

When we consider that Cloud-based WiFi is the way of the future, it’s straightforward to understand that a managed WLAN solution is more than just coordinating employee access.

Managed WiFi is often called Smart WiFi, but it is much more than smart access points. More frequently, it is a carefully constructed enterprise-grade system made up of distributed WiFi access points, controllers, switches, smart WLAN, switches, and high-quality cabling.

The system is generally designed by a Cloud Solution Provider (CSP), or Managed Service Provider (MSP) that specializes in WiFi as a Service (WaaS).

Why Managed WiFi for Businesses?

The expansion of smartphone use (currently over 3 billion worldwide) and the increase of BYOD enterprises have also increased connectivity. Besides, to provide safe and fast connectivity to the increasing number of diverse devices, WiFi is required.

What’s more, internet use has exploded with the advent of web applications and social media platforms. Did you know that it’s often your employees who keep your business represented on the internet, and they need more than their email accounts to do it?

Whether you have a large corporate enterprise or a small business housed in a single location, connectivity is critical to keep your business running against the competition. It lets you communicate with the business community, do product and competitor research, and run advertising campaigns.

Your business IT team may think they’ve got this, but more often, when they are tasked with upgrading the WiFi network, it results in employees unable to connect.

Turning to a managed service provider for your WiFi is an excellent solution, and often employees like managed services. Here are a few reasons that explain why choosing managed WiFi is a sound decision.

1. Managed WiFi Is Cost-Effective

With managed WiFi, you can reduce internal IT costs. Besides, MSPs consistently implement excellent wireless solutions that are a fraction of what it costs to hire in-house staff to manage IT support. MSPs understand annual licensing requirements related to enterprise WiFi.

A managed WiFi provider can ensure you don’t face additional expenses to reestablish access points or services that get suspended because of your in-house IT team’s oversight. Everything is installed, upgraded, re-licensed, and on time.

Besides, since a managed WiFi provider often orders more products, they get the best products available with a significant discount that they pass on to you. When you are buying commercial-grade WiFi, it’s essential to get the best deal possible.

2. Access to Specialists

An outsourced team of specialists helps ensure your network’s uptime. Besides, they are reliable and give exceptional support that makes you and your company look great to employees, visitors, and clients.

Realizing that you need to outsource this part of your business isn’t bad news. It’s the byproduct of your company’s growth combined with the technology needs you have that has brought you to this juncture. Your IT team, as skilled as they are in many things, are not Jacks of all trades.

Now it’s time to assess the shortlist of providers to determine what services you need from them and if they are credible and worthy of your trust. It’s not an easy task, but it’s one from which your company will reap benefits.

Where wireless technology is concerned, it isn’t always flawless. Sometimes devices decide inconveniently not to play nice anymore, and access points can burn out occasionally.

A managed WiFi provider is someone to call during an emergency. You may think of them as life insurance with an extra expense until you need it. Managed WiFi works the same.

3. Increased Security

Under the best conditions, networks get compromised. Right now, it’s more frequent than ever before. From data breaches to ransomware attacks, a look at online news show a bleak picture. Still, often it is inadequate security, or security configurations that don’t exist that are the root cause of these incidents.

Frequently, network security is seen as logins and access control, but it goes beyond that. It would help if you had the right equipment, and right people with strategic plans, on your team.

The right managed WiFi provider will begin their process with a detailed discovery. It helps them determine how your business uses wireless networks and which particular functions users need to access long before purchasing a single piece of equipment.

4. Detailed Monitoring and Reporting

With 24x7x365 proactive monitoring, your provider learns about you and your users on the network. Reports that provide details on your uplink performance, network utilization, and other primary metrics enable business operations decisions that are better and more informed.

Besides, it will help you make customizations to your network based on their reports.

New enterprise-grade systems allow you to manage all of your access points from one controller, unlike older wireless equipment. When you have gateway controllers and firewalls, it gives you a deeper understanding of which applications or employees are using more bandwidth.

Even though a traditional IT services provider wouldn’t be able to, your managed WiFi provider can tell you if you need more bandwidth or are paying too much.

5. Informed WiFi System Upgrades Decisions

The equipment you buy today has a life cycle of 36 months, generally. You may get to use them for five years. Still, then you’re forced to upgrade due to changes in the pricing of bandwidth, changes in wireless standards, laptops, and newer mobile devices that may require you to upgrade your network infrastructure in specific ways or buy new access points.

Your new business WiFi system that you have implemented will need regular updates and maintenance to increase security and improve performance. Most experts suggest it’s essential to do this on time and create backups of previous configurations to protect you if something goes amiss.

What’s more, you have someone who will take care of all of it in your managed WiFi provider. They will make sure that you don’t have a minute of downtime or a single glitch.

6. Improved Experiences

Whether it’s a user or a customer, WiFi is an added value when working correctly. When your customer is waiting to meet you, they can comfortably check email, read the news, or browse the web. Their time in your reception will pass much quicker when they have this distraction.

You shouldn’t think about WiFi at all. It should work, and using a managed WiFi provider takes you to that plateau. Besides, there are many customizations that your provider can implement at your request. For example, bandwidth throttling and content filtering are two features that can be used to control bandwidth use on your network.

You can also control what websites and website categories employees can visit.

Beyond all the controls, you can use your WiFi network for advertising by having splash pages custom designed. These pages are branded and greet any guest user of your network and educate them on your products and services.

You’ll find that clients will appreciate this kind of advertising and tech ingenuity. Your business brand will get a tremendous lift from it.

What’s Next in Managed WiFi

Adopting managed WiFi services for your business can take a load off your IT team and let them focus on more business-centric tasks, like ERP, software, and application development. It also enables you to get back to running your business without worrying about your employees or guests’ internet connectivity.

Choosing the right services and the right provider can get complicated. We get it. We’ve been helping businesses like yours for the last 10 years.

If you have questions or want to know more, get in touch. We have the answers you are seeking.