Going to the ballpark for a Major League Baseball game is an experience shaped as much by factors that are largely invisible to the casual sports fan as by diving catches, double plays and home runs.

That experience, of course, has much to do with the quality of the product on the field, the result of players and personnel across the entire organization having timely, reliable information, tools and insight to excel at their work. This could include the overseas training site to spring training and minor league facilities, all the way to the major league ballpark. It is also about giving fans their money’s worth, from ticketing and parking to scoreboard infotainment and concessions. It’s about media keeping the world updated with what’s happening on the field. And it is about ensuring all the people and infrastructure required to support and operate a franchise are synched to a single outcome: delivering a winning, profitable product.

All the inputs for achieving that outcome mostly depend to a on digital technology. Which is why professional sports organizations like the Cleveland Guardians are investing strategically to modernize their IT infrastructure. One of MLB’s longest-running professional franchises, the Guardians had until recently relied on a communications network that was past its time. Issues with the network were causing a range of disruptions, from scoreboard outages to difficulties disseminating real-time information such as players’ statistics, team performance metrics and videos. Network outages were frequent, and network equipment was time-consuming and costly to repair.

Leaders of the Guardians’ operational team decided it was time to upgrade the franchise’s IT infrastructure.

It is a similar story for organizations across the professional sports and business worlds. Whether they compete on a playing field, or in a direct-to-consumer or business-to-business market, enterprises are realizing that to deliver the kinds of high-quality, digitally focused experiences that their customers, employees and stakeholders expect, they have no choice but to move away from aging legacy IT infrastructure. There are five areas that businesses in any industry should be prioritizing to ensure the success of an IT modernization effort:

1. Cloud capabilities to support advanced, intelligent analytics tools. From in-stadium digital displays to behind-the-scenes facility management systems to analytics that help team decision-makers optimize a roster and help athletes improve their skillsets, professional sports is a high-tech, data-intensive industry. The vast computing power, apps and data-management capabilities required to put these tech tools and data to use are housed almost wholly in the cloud. Therefore organizations must shift their IT infrastructure from on-premise to the cloud. This holds true for any type of business that wants to make the most of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence.

2. A single, resilient, powerful and flexible network that is accessible to the entire organization across multiple locations. For the Guardians, the move to the cloud started with a shift to a cloud-enabled software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN), which offers a combination of redundancy, resilience, reliability, scalability, security and cost-effectiveness, with the high bandwidth and low latency required to support intelligent, data-intensive apps. In the case of the Guardians, its entire operation across eight locations, including its headquarters Progressive Field in Cleveland, Ohio USA, along with its minor league affiliates, Arizona spring training facility and training site in the Dominican Republic, are connected to the same network.

Moving 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.”

Kuszmaul and his team now monitor network conditions and enforce network policies across all those locations via a single, user-friendly portal. “What really sold the SD-WAN solution was the ability to bring everything into a centralized portal,” he said.

3. Multiple layers of security to protect the network and the data running across it. Businesses must be good stewards of their own competitive data, as well as the data their customers provide when they use their credit cards to purchase tickets or buy a beer at the stadium. That means the organization must protect all the surfaces of their network, a task made easier with the security layers built into SD-WAN, including private connectivity, encryption and other measures. Shifting to SD-WAN also gives businesses access to next-level IT security solutions (such as SASE, short for secure access service edge) to thwart increasingly sophisticated and persistent cyberthreats.

4. Communications platforms that readily integrate with the rest of IT infrastructure. Besides being good data stewards, professional sports franchises must also ensure that not only are the lines of communication always open with fans, players, front-office decision-makers, operational staff, other teams, suppliers, the media and more, but also that these communications help to shape high-quality experiences for all these stakeholders when they interact with the organization. To those ends, more sports teams and businesses are shifting to cloud-based communications platforms that readily integrate with the rest of their IT infrastructure, such as contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) and unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS). By integrating solutions like these with a cloud-enabled network such as SD-WAN, an enterprise creates a powerful, versatile and scalable fully cloud-based digital IT backbone.

5. A technology partner for the long haul. Professional sports franchises must excel at team building — with their suppliers, vendors and tech providers as well as their on-field product. In the case of the Guardians, the team’s IT department chose a long-term technology partner (a managed service provider, or MSP) to co-manage its network. By doing so, it gets what amounts to an extension of its IT team, a digital communications expert to configure, implement, upgrade, monitor, troubleshoot and generally oversee its network. Not only does a managed SD-WAN service give the team cost certainty (as an operating cost rather than a capital cost), it shifts risk (of equipment failure, tech obsolescence, etc.) to the MSP, and frees the Guardians’ IT staff to focus on higher-value work. It also simplifies vendor management for them. Instead of having to deal with multiple providers, each associated with a specific aspect of the network (one for hardware, one for software, one for cloud, one for security, etc.), they have a single point of contact that’s accountable for all of it.

For the Guardians infrastructure and operations teams, sticking to these fundamentals during the IT infrastructure modernization effort is translating into a range of benefits, some impacting the customer experience that are noticeable to the team’s fans, and others evident to players, the front office and staff, and media covering the team. Players and coaches can use the latest data-intensive apps to analyze video to improve the shape of a pitcher’s curveball, for example, or to adjust a hitter’s swing path, and do so without latency or interruption, whether they are training at the home stadium in Cleveland, or at one of the team’s other sites. On game days, fans have the bandwidth they need to access their favorite apps. The same goes for stadium operations staff and concession vendors. No more untimely scoreboard outages or eighth-inning hotdog shortages. The operation itself is seamless, supporting an overall winning experience across touchpoints and locations.

Indeed, the business case for pursuing an IT upgrade transcends industries. Regardless of business type, organizations can find value in elevating the digital experience they provide to broaden and deepen relationships with customers. And what company would not want to provide its employees with a richer, digitally enabled experience so they can perform their jobs better, which in turn improves an organization’s ability to attract and hold onto the employees they value, whether they are applying their skills to grow a business, serve a customer or hit a baseball.

In the Guardians’ case, the IT upgrade could even be paying dividends on the field.