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Get your head in the clouds
Kevin Edwards, CCO, Nevaya says that the time for dithering is past: you’re no one if you’re not in the cloud.
“It is time to move on from the debate about whether to be in the cloud and talk about something else. No-one who is really serious about streamlining their operations, about delivering exceptional service, about making a profit, should still have a room full of technology they need to maintain.
“If you have one of these awful rooms – and we have all seen them in hotels – then you need a team to fix it when it goes wrong, and it will go wrong. That means a team which specialises in the technology you have, always on call, always ready to act, whether they are needed or not, remembering that there will be times when everything is working as they should, so these people will be, what? Helping out at reception?
“We don’t have teams to spare at the moment in hospitality and certainly no money to maintain such an expert one. There needs to be a shift in mentality, because all you’re doing really is storing up costs of people that are maintaining equipment.
“I use the analogy of security in IT systems. Look at the government, how they are constantly suffering data breaches. That’s because they’re not information security experts, that’s not what they do. Whereas you go to somebody like Google, they’ve got a team the size of every government in the world combined specialising in security. Cloud services remove the need for the depth of knowledge, you acquire a service that is managed and maintained by experts with the depth of skills to support what is required, what is more, it has infinite scalability.
“It’s about giving yourself access to the right resources, as opposed to trying to be an expert in infrastructure, applications, security. You can’t expect one person to understand all of the different disciplines, but the cloud means it’s out there and it’s available.
“And once you get rid of that room, it changes the billing model. Having everything off site means that you go from a large capital expense to an operational cost. You are acquiring a service, rather than spending huge amounts of capital on IT projects.
“For us, we not only want all equipment out of those backrooms, we want it out of the guest rooms as well. And the reason for this is that we want the operational teams to focus on delivering operations and not having to go into the guest room. The dongles in rooms have, historically, created the most issues around casting and in our new platform the cloud cuts these out, as well as increasing scalability, making it unlimited. This means that as a group, you can continue to grow and you can deliver the same consistent service across your estate.
“And when it’s done well, you can even reduce your on-premise staff down to none. Brands like Numa have perfected it so that all you have is one security person. You take care of the check in, you’re already connected to the wifi, you can get into your room. What else do you really want? It’s meeting a guest need and an investor need. Every cloud really does have a silver lining.”