IT in the Entertainment Industry

Businesses in the entertainment industry work around the clock to keep the party going for their guests—from tight, ever changing schedules to high expenses to an abundance of large files to manage and share. With so many moving parts, it’s essential to have a solid managed service provider (MSP) that you can trust to keep your IT operations running as smoothly and safely as possible.

IT Management Best Practices in Entertainment

There are many factors to consider when managing IT for your entertainment business. Essentially, you have to work hard so your customers can play hard. Although every business in entertainment is going to have different offerings, services, and products, one thing remains the same across the board: the weight the customer experience holds. Follow these best practices to ensure that your IT is streamlined, organized, and properly managed to provide an optimal customer experience and smooth operations across the board.

Establish a Strong Internet Network Redundancy

Nothing kills a good time quite like an internet outage, especially if your entire operations depend on it (which most businesses do). That’s why it’s important to implement a backend internet infrastructure—commonly required for opening, maintaining, or growing your business. Just think, without an established backend internet infrastructure, you can lose access to your point of sale system, audiovisuals, VoIP, and security system.

Whether it’s your internal internet network or guest wireless network, you don’t want your internet to fail. If, in a worst-case scenario, your network does go down, you’ll want to rely on network redundancy or a disaster recovery plan. What is network redundancy? Essentially, it’s the process of implementing multiple communication pathways and alternative devices to a business’ network. To ensure that internet outages never affect the various technologies your business relies on, it’s best to implement failover and even a secondary failover. For extra support, it is recommended to set up a tertiary LTE cellular backup as a last line of defense so that in the case of a network disaster, you can keep your business running. Check out this case study featuring our client Puttshack, who trusted Exact IT to lead a complete setup of network infrastructure and internet-enabled devices.

Ongoing Management

Technology is a multidimensional aspect of your business, and you need to provide it with the ongoing management it needs to keep it all running efficiently. To ensure high utilization, it’s critical to monitor the internal physical ports and bandwidth to adjust and reallocate when necessary. You never know when errors will occur, but you can minimize this risk by checking on how things are running periodically.

Monitor and Remediate Security Vulnerabilities

It’s 2023, meaning cybersecurity is not optional; it’s essential. It’s best practice to monitor your router status and port status for any potential security issues. Especially for the sake of customer loyalty, you’ll want to protect your guests’ data while they use the guest wifi network provided by your business. Typically when customers join a guest network, they trust that the business hosting that network houses strong cybersecurity practices to minimize risk to guest users.

As an added layer of protection, it’s best practice to provide cybersecurity training to all your employees. Your team is only as strong as your weakest link, which is especially true regarding your cybersecurity practice. Your staff can be an extremely vulnerable target if you don’t train them on how to handle threats or disasters. In fact, you may be surprised by how many organizations face security issues that are caused by their employees. Although these issues typically stem from something as small as user error, they can lead to major problems down the line if the hacker gains internal access to your company’s data. That is why cybersecurity training for employees is a necessary step in the onboarding process and should be revisited periodically.

Ongoing IT Helpdesk Support

Finding an MSP with an IT Helpdesk is a no-brainer decision for your business. IT helpdesks support all the employees and leadership of the company to troubleshoot, answer burning questions, and find solutions to all kinds of technical issues that arise.

Depending on your business hours (as many entertainment businesses work late nights), you may want to go the extra mile and outsource an MSP that offers an IT helpdesk with 24-hour support. The most common cybersecurity threats include email phishing, password attacks, malware, ransomware, and distributed denial of service attacks. While it’s almost impossible to predict when cyber attacks will happen, the best thing you can do is be prepared and have access to an IT helpdesk that is only a call away.

The bottom line? You can’t predict that an emergency or disaster is going to happen between the business hours of 9 AM- 5 PM, so why should you wait to take action until your IT helpdesk opens? Having 24-hour access to your IT helpdesk provides you with a piece of mind, so you can minimize the stress and anxiety of managing your cybersecurity and IT operations. As they say, it takes a village!