The florist is setting up. The catering team is doing final prep. Five hundred guests are forty-five minutes away. The AV team is doing their equipment pre-check.

The Wi-Fi just crashed.

If you operate events at large venues, this nightmare is probably familiar to you. When payment terminals come online and guests all reach for their phones at the same time, everything depends on the network. It doesn’t matter if you run a conference center or a wedding facility, when you have hundreds of exhibitors, vendors, or attendees connecting to your network at once, the worst-case scenario may be just one connection away.

Today’s venue networks support everything from payments and presentations to guest connectivity along with day-to-day business operations.

Four Technology Challenges Every Event Venue Faces

Here’s four technology challenges our events clients see most often and how to address them.

Handling the Event Demand Spike

Most hospitality businesses gets a steady flow of guests throughout the day. An event venue can go from zero to hundreds, or thousands, in minutes and stays that way for hours. Suddenly, a flood of devices are connecting at one time. That means payment terminals, live presentations, streaming videos, guest Wi-Fi, and cloud applications are all competing for the same network resources. Networks that aren’t designed for that kind of sustained, simultaneous demand start to slow or stop altogether, delaying transactions for that feed the bottom line and impacting the experience for guests, staff, and vendors alike.

Managing Payment Systems Under Peak Demand

A busy event can generate hundreds of payment transactions in a short period of time across bars, concessions, merchandise, parking, and other services. Those payment systems have to keep working even when the network is under its heaviest load. Payment card industry data security standard (PCI DSS) requirements are key to protecting payment data. When you mix high transaction volume, temporary staff, and time pressure, you get one of the easiest places for security mistakes to happen if payment systems aren’t properly segmented, secured, and monitored.

Securing Vendor and Exhibitor Network Access

Every event brings new technology onto your network. AV teams, exhibitors, production companies, and production companies often connect laptops, streaming equipment, printers and other devices to venue infrastructure. Those vendors connect their own equipment to the network without being briefed on security requirements. A vendor's laptop connecting for a single event can introduce malware, create an unmonitored access point, or leave behind a persistent connection that survives the event itself.

Building Redundancy into Critical Event Infrastructure

Event IT infrastructure needs redundancy in every layer including internet connections from different providers, redundant network switching, and backup payment processing capability. Most event venues don’t have this though. Instead, they have a single internet connection or one core switch. During a live event, there’s no maintenance window or opportunity for the action to pause while someone troubleshoots the problem. Waiting for someone to come and fix the issue is not a recovery plan.

Building the Foundation for Successful Events

Technology is the foundation of every successful event. The venues that consistently deliver exceptional events are the ones that prepare their infrastructure before the doors open.

That’s why ESP, a NexusTek company, works with clients to design IT infrastructure built to handle demand the network spikes, security requirements, and operational complexity unique to venue properties and their events. Network architecture and redundancy planning make payment security and vendor access management easier. We help you build the technology foundation you need to support any-sized venue flawlessly, no matter how complex.

Talk to NexusTek ESP about an IT assessment for your event venue. https://www.nexustek.com/contact-us