Customer Success Story
Big Bear Lake Delivers Stellar Visitor Experiences with Cloud-Managed Networking
Management at Big Bear Lake, a Southern California retreat, wanted to deliver great visitor experiences and grow tourism without getting tangled up in IT complexity. A cloud-managed wired and wireless solution gave the visitors center the network capabilities it needed and keeps operations simple.
Simplified
Collaboration with local businesses and partners to grow tourism
Improved
Network performance and reliability with businessgrade solution
Managed
Network quicker and easier
Strengthened
Security controls
Bringing Big Bear Lake into the modern age was Matt McCabe’s goal. A lifelong resident of Big Bear, McCabe manages the Big Bear Visitors Center at Big Bear Visitors Bureau. “As a destination marketing organization, it became a priority to use technology to step into the 21st century,” says McCabe.
An alpine community, however, poses certain connectivity challenges. Cell service can be spotty. Landline phones go out in bad weather. High-speed broadband is pricey. But great connectivity is necessary to run a business—and to meet visitors’ expectations for a great trip.
“We wanted to go where everyone is going, and that is the cloud,” says McCabe.
A cloud-managed wired and wireless solution from Juniper Networks and Aerohive gave Big Bear the enterprise-grade capabilities it needed without getting tangled up in complexity. The joint solution provides a simple-to-deploy, easy-to-manage cloud-based network infrastructure. Juniper provides high-performance, cloudmanaged switching while Aerohive delivers cloud management for its wireless access points.
The Juniper Sky Enterprise management solution provides visibility into Aerohive access points, creating a single pane-of-glass solution for managing both wired and wireless devices.
The Juniper Networks EX Series Ethernet Switch provides enterprise network access, while the Juniper Networks SRX Series Security Gateway provides highperformance firewall services while also consolidating security, routing, switching, and WAN connectivity.
Big Bear also moved to 3CX, an open unified communications and collaboration platform hosted by Blue Chip. Phone service is now top-notch, eliminating problems with sound quality and intermittent outages. “Before, the phone lines wouldn’t work when there was bad weather and the Internet wasn’t available,” says McCabe. “Now, we’re unlikely to see the phone system go down.”
“The network is at the core of our business,” says McCabe. “Working with our local businesses, accessing applications and making phone calls wouldn’t be possible without a bulletproof network from Juniper.”
With the Juniper network, business-grade networking was no longer out of reach for Big Bear. “We saved money with Juniper, and the performance has been better than ever before,” says McCabe. McCabe handles ongoing network operations. He has a realtime view of network performance and switch configuration and, if needed, he can make configuration changes through the intuitive, web-based Juniper Sky Enterprise portal.
Best of all, when McCabe needs expert help, Blue Chip is just a text message away. “I don’t have a deep background in IT,” he says. “But I do need to understand how IT works, because I need to be able to troubleshoot if a technician isn’t available.” To learn more about networking, McCabe went through Juniper training. “I got more familiar with administering a business-grade network. It empowered us to handle more on our own,” he says.
Ron Herman, president of Blue Chip, agrees. “I want a customer’s solution to last ten years. It’s not a good value if the customer has to upgrade in a few years because they’ve run out of horsepower,” he says. “With Juniper, Big Bear has a core network for anything that they want to do in the future.”
“My goal is to serve our community and use the best tools at our disposal to increase the strength of our tourism economy,” says McCabe. “Because we have better technology, we’re able to do our jobs better.”
The Products
Juniper Sky Enterprise
Juniper Sky Enterprise provides easy cloud-based management to reduce costs and simplify enterprise networks deploying Juniper switching and security products.
The EX Series Ethernet Switches are cloud-ready, high-performance access and aggregation/core layer switches designed for enterprise branch, campus, and data center networks. Wired access networks don’t have to be complex—you can reduce risk and cost without compromising performance, quality, and innovation.
SRX300
SRX300 next-generation firewall connects and secures small branch or retail offices and consolidates security, SD-WAN, routing, and switching in a small desktop device.
Published November 2018