When the Buffalo Bills broke ground on a new Highmark Stadium, we weren’t just building concrete and seating. We were gaining the rare chance to rebuild the network and security posture behind it too, from a blank slate. Learn how my team and I built it, before the stadium around it was even finished. 

Out with the old

For 52 years, Highmark Stadium was home for the Buffalo Bills. It was also, by the end, showing its age. Narrow concourses. Not enough restrooms. A building designed for a different era of game day experience. 

When we broke ground on a new Highmark Stadium, the physical need was obvious: more space, better amenities, a structure built for Buffalo weather instead of in spite of it.  

What wasn’t as obvious to most people outside my department was that the building wasn’t the only thing showing its age. The network behind it was too.  

Our old stadium ran on a mix of vendors stitched together over years of shifts in the IT landscape. Fans told us constantly: the Wi-Fi was slow, connectivity dropped at the exact moment they wanted it most. For me and my team, every problem meant touching a different system. A firewall issue meant going to the firewall vendor. A switch issue meant going to the switch vendor. We were spread thin, much like the old stadium was physically. Neither one was built for what the fans (or us) were asking of in today’s times. Ultimately, what we had was a patchwork of systems struggling to keep up, and no single, validated security posture protecting it all. 

In with the new

When the Bills got the chance to build a new stadium, I got the chance to rebuild something just as important: the network and security posture behind it.  

What we needed was a single platform to free us from the mess of our vendor patchwork. One platform to run every system. One pane of glass to run our entire networking and security operation.  

We knew Cisco was the platform we could trust to get us there.  

Months before the stadium was ever finished, we built a tech building outside the stadium to run our operation and stay ready for whatever adaptations we’ll need in future decades. When the stadium was ready, we flipped the switch and our tech was ready to go. 

Then, we built a team within the Cisco portfolio. To run the fabric powering fan experience and broadcast excellence: Catalyst switching, Wi-Fi 7 access points across the stadium, and Cisco IPFM with N9000 Switches. To secure and defend it all: Cisco Secure Firewall embedded directly. Then for our operational insights, Cisco Spaces, Cisco Stadium Vision, and Cisco UCS compute with Nutanix storage in the data room give us real-time telemetry that powers deep intelligence, allowing us to make the most informed decision. All that, running on one cohesive architecture. 

That structure is what makes the security layer work so naturally. In our old stadium, Cisco Secure Firewall would have been one more thing for our team to learn, monitor, and reconcile against everything else. Here, it’s not an additional system at all. It’s part of the same fabric running our switching and our Wi-Fi, which means there’s no seam between systems for a problem (or a threat) to hide in. It also means our network is as reliable as Bills Mafia showing up in sub-zero weather. 

Overbuilt on purpose

The decision to rely on Cisco full-stack is what gives me peace. You can’t just hope the stadium holds up under the weight of 60,000 fans, and the exact same goes for the network. In a 60,000-seat stadium, we engineered capacity for 80,000 concurrent devices. When tens of thousands of fans simultaneously stream, post, and transact during a fourth-quarter touchdown, the network doesn’t flinch. 

In the process, we became the first stadium in the NFL running a complete Wi-Fi 7 deployment.  

When Bills Mafia enters the gates

But a new, reliable network is even more powerful when the fans actually notice its outcomes: Sharing media with friends and family becomes just as easy as if they were on the couch at home. The scoreboard and sound finally feel like they’re in perfect sync. Ordering a ride home is as quick and easy as ever. That’s what all of this is meant for. And it’s already showing up in our Voice of the Fan survey, where we’re seeing drastic increases in ratings across the board.  

A new stadium gets the headlines, but the network running underneath it doesn’t. It was never supposed to. Its job is to be so reliable that nobody watching the game ever needs to think about it. So powerful it makes everything else just work. So secure that we never need to worry about it. 

In the new Highmark Stadium, the Bills got a stadium built for the next generation. With the Cisco platform, our IT department did too. 

Every industry has its own game day. See how the Buffalo Bills’ unified Cisco platform offers a model for any high-stakes operation.