It’s Tuesday morning. By 6 a.m., your payment system is running slow, the parking gate won’t respond, a guest is disputing a charge at the front desk, and your IT manager reports a phishing email hitting staff inboxes. In the lobby, everything looks fine. The coffee is fresh. The music is soft. Guests are checking out without a care.
What looks like an ordinary weekday morning is actually a risk event unfolding in real time. Dozens of safeguards are being tested simultaneously: network resilience, identity controls, backup connectivity, fraud detection, and system redundancy. All of it invisible to guests. All of it critical to operations.
That peaceful scene persists only if the right protections are already in motion behind the scenes.
The Rising Stakes: Hospitality’s Growing Exposure
According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025, breach costs in hospitality climbed from $3.82 million to $4.03 million—even as several other industries saw costs stabilize or decline. With one in six breaches now involving artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled attack activity, threat actors are moving faster than traditional security models were designed to handle—especially in always-on hospitality environments.¹ And as properties become more connected across mobile access, cloud payments, smart-room systems, and integrated partner platforms, they also become more exposed.
Meanwhile, guest expectations continue rising. More than 90% of travelers say hotel Wi-Fi is “very important,” and 58% report that quality directly influences their booking decisions.² You’re managing a growing threat landscape while serving guests who won’t tolerate disruption of any kind. In an industry built entirely on trust, a single failure carries financial, reputational, regulatory, and safety consequences that extend far beyond the front desk. It’s no surprise that the industry is redirecting capital toward technology as a core value driver alongside physical upgrades and branding.³
The question is no longer whether to invest in IT—it’s whether those investments are actively reducing risk or quietly expanding it.
Where Risk Becomes Reality: Five Critical Pressure Points
In hospitality, risk isn’t hypothetical—it’s operational. The gap between a system performing and a system failing is often measured in seconds, and that gap, across five common pressure points, is where guest trust and business stability are won or lost.
1. Access points are the front line of business risk
Access is no longer a facilities issue. It’s a business-wide trust framework that governs who can touch revenue systems, guest data, and physical spaces. Every identity—guest, staff, vendor, contractor—creates a shifting risk surface that must be controlled. In a connected property, access is never static; it changes by the hour with shift rotations, check-ins, job roles, and third-party integrations, making real-time enforcement essential to security and compliance.
Reining in risk: Centralized identity and access management built on role-based access control (RBAC) ensures digital keys, staff credentials, and vendor permissions align strictly to job function across every system and property. With automated provisioning and real-time revocation, access stays continuously accurate, preserving guest convenience while eliminating lingering exposure.
2. Payment systems supercharge revenue risk
Payments now sit at the intersection of guest experience, regulatory exposure, and revenue continuity—and cloud-connected POS platforms are the switchboard. A modern hospitality operation is no longer processing isolated transactions. It is managing always-on financial workflows tied directly into reservations, loyalty programs, room charges, and guest profiles with personal information. Any degradation in that ecosystem immediately becomes a business risk, not just a technical issue.
Reining in risk: Resilient POS and payment architecture with encryption, continuous monitoring, and automated failover keeps revenue flowing while maintaining PCI alignment and fraud controls, even when networks degrade or processors lag. When compliance, security, and uptime are engineered into the transaction layer, operations remain in a steady state without regulatory surprises.
3. Technical “glitches” mask cyber risk
Cyber risk rarely begins as a dramatic event. It emerges through small inconsistencies in identity, configuration, and access that accumulate silently over time. The most damaging incidents often originate from what appear to be routine operational anomalies rather than obvious security alerts. Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report shows stolen credentials and phishing remain among the top initial access vectors in breaches. Vulnerability exploitation as an entry point rose 34%, representing 20% of all breaches.⁴
Reining in risk: Continuous threat detection, identity protection, and permission governance neutralize attacks inside normal operations. When security is embedded into everyday operations, cyber risk is neutralized quietly—before it ever becomes visible.
4. Downtime amplifies safety risk
Physical safety is now inseparable from network and Wi-Fi availability. Surveillance cameras, emergency notification systems, electronic access controls, license-plate readers, and gate systems all ride on the same wired and wireless infrastructure. When Wi-Fi degrades, bandwidth saturates, or switching fails, safety systems can come to a screeching halt.
Reining in risk: Segmented, redundant network and Wi-Fi architecture with priority routing ensures life-safety systems are isolated from guest traffic and remain operational even during congestion or outages. When surveillance, alerts, and access control never have to compete for bandwidth, safety stays dependable under all conditions.
5. Staff change multiplies operational risk
Workforce stability in hospitality is inherently fluid by design. Seasonality, rotating shifts, and shared devices create constant operational motion rather than fixed continuity. When critical knowledge lives only in people instead of systems, disruption accelerates instantly. The more recovery depends on individual memory and random training, the more fragile performance becomes under pressure.
Reining in risk: Standardized platforms, centralized device management, and robust training within automated workflows encode best practices directly into daily operations, keeping service levels stable through turnover, onboarding cycles, training gaps, and staffing shortages.
Managing Risk Invisibly: The ESP Approach
This is where ESP, a NexusTek company, becomes part of your risk reduction strategy. ESP delivers managed IT services purpose-built for lodging environments, including hotels, resorts, outdoor hospitality, membership communities, and mixed-use properties. The goal isn’t just system uptime. It’s continuous risk reduction without disrupting the guest experience.
What this looks like in practice:
- Security and compliance frameworks aligned with PCI DSS and privacy requirements
- 24/7 U.S.-based monitoring and technical support that detect threats and system failures
- Cloud resilience and disaster recovery architecture that keeps operations running through outages, cyberattacks, and system failures
- Strategic IT consulting for growth, modernization, and AI adoption
- Identity, access, and device management across staff, guests, vendors, and third parties
- Network engineering built for redundancy, segmentation, and controlled access
Control the Risk. Protect the Experience.
In today’s hospitality environment, risk management is woven into every reservation, transaction, connected device, and access point across your properties. If you’re ready to move from reactive firefighting to confident, proactive operations, ESP can help you build a hospitality infrastructure where risk is managed continuously—and invisibly—without compromising the guest experience.
See how ESP supports hospitality IT from end to end.
- IBM, Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025, July 2025.
- Hotel Internet Services, Survey of Hoteliers and Guests Reveals Latest Hospitality Wi-Fi Trends and Expectations, accessed November 2025
- PwC, Hospitality companies leverage near-term stability for long-term success, August 2024
- Verizon, Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report: Alarming surge in cyberattacks through third-parties, accessed November 2025
About the Author
Jason Pullo
Founder, ESP, a NexusTek company
Jason Pullo is a seasoned technology entrepreneur with a passion for transforming the hospitality industry through innovative IT solutions. As Founder and CEO of Enterprise Solutions Providers, he leads the company’s vision and growth, helping hotels navigate everything from new builds and brand transitions to large-scale renovations. Since launching the firm in 2003, Jason has played a key role in the technology strategy behind more than 1,000 hotel acquisitions. His journey began at just 18 years old as an IT manager for a trade show company, and he’s since led major projects like a multimillion-dollar hotel renovation in New York City, delivering guest-centric technology with measurable business impact.
