This wasn’t supposed to be the Cleveland Guardians’ year. Coming off a losing season in 2023, oddsmakers were projecting a similarly middling performance for the Major League Baseball team in 2024.
Since then, the Guardians have done nothing but prove the oddsmakers wrong. Deep into the 2024 season, the team was on pace to exceed 90 wins, and in solid position to compete for a championship.
A big reason for the Guardians’ success? A top-to-bottom commitment to solid fundamentals, from the team it puts on the field to its facilities, front and back offices, and the infrastructure that supports them. Recognizing that giving the public a superior product, one that’s positioned to consistently exceed expectations and outperform the competition, would require best-in-class operational and technology capabilities, decision-makers with the Guardians identified the organization’s communications network as a prime area to upgrade. They were confident that a more powerful, secure, and resilient communications network would have a broad impact across the organization and ultimately provide a strong return on investment.
Now, the results of that investment are evident in the team’s management of its facilities, the experience it provides its fans, and the overall product it puts on the field. To get there, though, the Guardians’ IT team first had to make a tough call to modernize. As is the case with a team that relies too heavily on aging, past-their-prime veterans, they realized their organization was held back by a past-its-prime network. Network shortcomings were causing in-game stadium scoreboard glitches and other issues that detracted from the experience inside the ballpark, as well as hampered the flow of real-time information to employees, vendors, players and fans. Network outages were frequent, and the legacy network equipment on which the team depended was time-consuming and costly to repair or replace. It was time, they concluded, to supplant the high-salaried, underperforming veteran—the expensive-to-maintain legacy network—with a younger, highly touted successor.
The heir apparent in this case was a software-defined wide-area network, or SD-WAN, a cloud-based network construct that provides a combination of redundancy, resilience, reliability, scalability, security, and cost-effectiveness, with the high bandwidth and low latency that enterprise organizations must have to support a digital IT infrastructure and intelligent, data-intensive apps. SD-WAN is powerful, secure, and flexible—and in the Guardians’ case, it covers the entire organization’s communications needs across multiple locations, including its headquarters and home field, Progressive Field, in Cleveland, along with its minor league affiliates, spring training facility in Arizona, and player development operation in the Dominican Republic.
The shift to SD-WAN “allowed for a more efficient and cost-effective way to manage the things that we were previously managing,” explained Whitney Kuszmaul, senior director of infrastructure and operations for the Guardians. “It gives us more flexibility in routing traffic and in synching data to and from various locations, and it even enables us to onboard new services without having to adapt one particular site or another.”
Here are several factors that have contributed to the team’s successful shift to SD-WAN:
- A full embrace of the cloud to access and support advanced tools that enable employees—and players—to do their jobs better. As data-reliant and digital-intensive as operating stadium facilities and a sports franchise has become, shifting business processes and IT infrastructure to the cloud is a critical step to access the vast computing power, advanced apps, and data-management capabilities that support digital displays inside the stadium, for example, as well as the facilities management systems to operate club offices and other facilities, and to drive the analytics capabilities that help team decision-makers optimize a roster and athletes improve their skillsets.
- Sophisticated cybersecurity to protect the network, sensitive customer and operational data, and other IT assets. Like any business, a pro sports team has to be a good data steward. To do so, it needs the means to protect all the surfaces of its network from increasingly sophisticated and persistent cyberattackers. One of the big benefits of SD-WAN is its built-in security measures, including private connectivity and encryption. Having SD-WAN also positions an organization to move to a next-level IT security strategy like Secure Access Service Edge (SASE).
- Communications platforms that seamlessly integrate to create a unified digital environment. Keeping the lines of communication open with multiple stakeholders is a must for any organization, and especially for a pro sports team that’s accountable to fans, players, staff, other teams, suppliers, the media, and more. To provide high-quality experiences to all these stakeholders, more businesses, sports franchises included, are building IT infrastructure around communications solutions like Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) that can readily integrate with a cloud-enabled network like SD-WAN. The result is a cloud-based digital backbone that’s scalable and supports a superior fan (customer) and employee experience.
- A long-term technology partner. Regardless of the business you’re in, it’s important to build a bench full of reliable suppliers, vendors, and tech providers. The Guardians’ IT department added to its bench by aligning with a managed service provider, or MSP, to co-manage its network. The MSP serves as an extension of the Guardians’ IT team by taking on responsibility for implementing, monitoring, troubleshooting, and overseeing the communications network.
Because the team followed fundamentals like these in shifting its communications network to the cloud, Guardians fans get a high-quality digital experience inside the stadium on game days, operations staff have the real-time connectivity they need to support that experience, and players and coaches get access to the technology capabilities they need to improve their performance as they drive toward a winning 2024 season and sustained excellence over the long haul.
Mike Flannery is president of Windstream Enterprise, which provides cloud-enabled connectivity, communications, and security solutions, with a focus on managed collaboration, connectivity, and network services for enterprise organizations.