WatchGuard Technologies Helps Museum of Flight Visitors Safely Soar Through Aviation History

SEATTLE, Dec. 15, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- WatchGuard Technologies, a leader in advanced network security solutions, today announced that The Museum of Flight has deployed WatchGuard Wi-Fi Cloud along with several WatchGuard firewall appliances. With limited IT staff, resources and budget, the museum turned to WatchGuard to improve the reliability and security of its Wi-Fi offerings for 250 employees,1,000 volunteers and 500,000 yearly patrons.

Established in 1965 at Boeing Field in Seattle, The Museum of Flight's mission is to educate and inspire the public by preserving and exhibiting historically significant air and space artifacts. But today's museum-goers want to both see the physical exhibits, and interact with and share them digitally. This means the museum must provide enterprise-grade Wi-Fi. Prior to WatchGuard, the museum's three-person IT staff used a Wi-Fi solution that lacked key guest engagement and security features, offered unreliable performance and was difficult for small teams to deploy and manage.

"Often times, our previous Wi-Fi solution couldn't handle even a moderate number of guests," said Hunter Hughes, director of IT at the Museum of Flight. "We would turn off the Wi-Fi in lieu of leaving it on, so that we could offer no Wi-Fi, as opposed to bad Wi-Fi. We also worried about our ability to offer a safe online environment for our guests – our old security appliances didn't support strong encryption and viewing blocked traffic in device logs was so difficult it was barely usable."

To fix these problems, the Museum of Flight deployed WatchGuard AP120 Access Points (APs) along with WatchGuard Wi-Fi Cloud management services and Dimension™ network visibility and reporting services. The Wireless Intrusion Prevention System (WIPS) built into these cloud-managed APs protects the museum from wireless threats with a false positive rate of nearly zero. The museum also installed WatchGuard's Firebox® M500 and M300 firewalls, giving them enterprise-grade protection.

Since switching to WatchGuard, the Museum of Flight has experienced a dramatic improvement in Wi-Fi performance and security. The museum's IT staff reports that using WatchGuard solutions has made deploying new APs and monitoring their network significantly easier for their small team. Hughes was especially pleased with Dimension, saying, "Dimension's near real-time response is a game changer. We are able to quickly and easily define new rules and operations in the Firebox management interface with no network downtime." The museum is now Friendly Wi-Fi accredited, blocking inappropriate and malicious web content from being accessed onsite, which is an important part of providing a safe and secure experience for visitors of all ages.

Wi-Fi Cloud also uses the data it collects to provide powerful engagement and analytics tools. The system tracks visitor information such as age, gender, buying tendencies, Wi-Fi device locations, customer dwell time, footfall and new vs. repeat users. Administrators can access this information in cloud-based dashboards and reports, and use it to better inform their business and marketing decisions. Wi-Fi Cloud also lets administrators create custom splash pages, videos, polls and surveys to deepen their interactions with customers. The Museum of Flight plans to use these capabilities in the near future.

"The museum can scale up or out at any given moment, and we know that WatchGuard's products will be able to grow with us," explained Hughes. "We're happy with the reliability and rich data provided by these solutions, we're ecstatic about the level of support, and we've never run into a problem we couldn't solve on the security side while using a WatchGuard product."

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

• Case Study: Museum of Flight
• Video: Museum of Flight, Interview with Director of IT
• Whitepaper: Guest Wi-Fi – The Most Valuable Marketing Tool for Physical Businesses
• Whitepaper: Classification — The Critical Missing Aspect of WIPS
• Wi-Fi Solution Brief: WatchGuard Secure Wi-Fi Offerings
• Online Product Information: https://www.watchguard.com/wifi

About WatchGuard Technologies, Inc.

WatchGuard® Technologies, Inc. is a global leader in network security, providing best-in-class Unified Threat Management, Next Generation Firewall, secure Wi-Fi, and network intelligence products and services to more than 75,000 customers worldwide. The company's mission is to make enterprise-grade security accessible to companies of all types and sizes through simplicity, making WatchGuard an ideal solution for Distributed Enterprises and SMBs. WatchGuard is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, with offices throughout North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Latin America. To learn more, visit WatchGuard.com.

For additional information, promotions and updates, follow WatchGuard on Twitter, @WatchGuard on Facebook, or on the LinkedIn Company page. Also, visit our InfoSec blog, Secplicity, for real-time information about the latest threats and how to cope with them at www.secplicity.org.

Media Contacts:

Chris Warfield
WatchGuard Technologies
206.876.8380
chris.warfield@watchguard.com

Anthony Cogswell
Voxus PR
253.444.5980
acogswell@voxuspr.com

SOURCE WatchGuard Technologies, Inc.