Making business resilient and secure for Little Rock Convention & Visitors Bureau

“People don’t think parking garages are necessarily IT heavy.”

Chris Phillips, SVP and CFO of the Little Rock Convention & Visitors Bureau (LRCVB), talks about a unique problem the organization faced.

“You have to run things like license plate monitors, and there’s basically no staff. You know? You can’t have a hotel guest checking in at 11 p.m. and need someone there to monitor that from an IT standpoint. And our customers trust us to deliver a great experience for their attendees.”

The bureau oversees seven different convention and visitors’ facilities in the town of Little Rock, Arkansas, employing a staff of 100 full-time and 70 part-time employees. The business is tasked with marketing the town as a place for tourists to visit and oversees the facilities and infrastructure that support tourism. And those tourists and convention guests can arrive in great numbers.

“We could go from 60 to 6,000 guests overnight.” But that statement undersells the challenge of providing Wi-Fi access to tourists and conference attendees. Crowds can swell as high as 23,000 for some events. And that amount of people, all trying to access the internet from a single location, can strain the bandwidth of the locations that the LRCVB oversees.

Big Risks for Little Rock

“We’ve faced bandwidth issues. We’ve faced firewall issues. Our internet usage on any day can go from truly little, when we have no events in town, to a whole lot when we’re hosting a big event,” Phillips told us.

“At our parking garages, our connectivity was provided through an Air Fiber Antenna, and that technology has let us down from time to time. It has no redundancy, and we’ve had those antennas get struck by lightning before. So, when they’re down, they’re just simply down.”

There’s also the ever-present risk of cyberattacks looming over everyone that relies on the internet to operate their business.

“We have a firewall. But our IT team wasn’t necessarily monitoring it beyond just installing updates. And as for cyberattacks, we had an ‘It’ll never happen to me’ mentality.‘ We’re not that big. Why would we be a target?”

Unfortunately, the LRCVB became a target for cybercriminals, which held the bureau’s internet services hostage.

“We were basically unable to operate for two weeks.”

Fixing Issues With the Lumen Personal Touch

Needing solutions for these three challenges—bandwidth, connectivity and security—Phillips began conversations with Lumen, seeking technology he could use to make the experience of his customers more robust, convenient and secure. He ultimately selected:

• 2 Gbps of burstable internet at three locations
• Direct Fiber at other connections
• SASE Firewall with SD-WAN
• VSOC (Virtual Security Operations Center)

“Lumen sat down with us on multiple calls and talked about how we operate, really trying to understand what we need,” Phillps told us.

“It wasn’t a pushy sales process where they said, ‘This is what you need and we’re not going to try to understand you or your environment.’ We were exposed to a lot of different offerings and ideas from experts. It wasn’t just an order-taking process.”

When it came time to decide on the solutions that Phillips needed for the LRCVB, the first solution was better connectivity for three of the bureau’s highest traffic areas.

“We went with 2 Gbps burstable internet. That was the scalable internet we needed to meet our customer and staff demands.”

For cyber security, Lumen provided the LRCVB with a SASE Firewall with SD-WAN, and a VSOC or Virtual Security Operations Center, which provides 24/7 Security Incident and Event Management (SIEM) monitoring, incident handling, and expert remediation recommendations. Any future attempts at holding the bureau hostage will face more lines of defense, discouraging criminals and redirecting them to easier targets.

And those parking garages? Lumen provided the LRCVB with new direct fiber lines, making it far harder for an errant lightning bolt to knock out a site’s connectivity.

Now Phillips, an accountant by trade, has a more full and secure suite of technology at his disposal. And the guests and customers of the Little Rock Convention and Visitor’s Bureau will have a better experience when they check into hotels, park their cars and use the Wi-Fi at the Statehouse Convention Center.

To hear more about how Lumen customers made their businesses more robust and secure, check out our customer success stories.

Current Lumen customer compensated for their endorsement

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