Is the coffee shop wifi safe to work on?
Staff work from trains, hotels, airports and coffee shops, and the free wifi is usually the first thing they connect to. Most of the time nothing goes wrong. But a public network is shared with strangers and run by someone you know nothing about, so it deserves less trust than the office.
The risks are fairly ordinary. Someone on the same network may be able to see unencrypted traffic. A fake hotspot with a convincing name can sit between a laptop and the internet. A login page can ask for more than it should. None of this takes great skill, which is why it is worth guarding against.
A handful of habits, and a few settings that can be applied to every device centrally, remove most of the exposure.
Most of these can be set once on a managed device, so nobody has to remember them.
Make the safe way the easy way.
Advice only goes so far. People are busy, and when they are trying to send one email before boarding they will not stop to think about network security. Protection that depends on everyone remembering the rules every time will fail sooner or later.
That is why it is better built into the device. A well managed laptop can connect through a VPN automatically, keep its disk encrypted, receive updates on a schedule and require multi-factor authentication for email and files. If it is lost or stolen, access can be removed the same day. The person using it just gets on with their work.
Endpoint protection, multi-factor authentication and safe defaults for every user are part of our managed IT agreements, with deeper security services for organisations that hold sensitive client data. If your team works away from the office, ask us to review how their devices are set up.
Good security is the kind people do not have to think about.