There is plenty of guidance in relation to the use of public Wi-Fi but as a business, offering free Wi-Fi can be an incentive for customers to use your premises. In recent years there has been a significant increase in remote working, and I know colleagues and contacts that will regularly base themselves in a café where they will connect to the premises’ Wi-Fi to work.
Yet, a question that often comes up when we are talking to business owners is if you want to offer Wi-Fi, what should you be considering when it comes to your customers safety and your own?
Effective measures to put in place
1. The first thing is making sure you’ve created different partitions of your network for public customer devices and private appliances. This is important as you do not want your till, card reader or private business devices to be seen by customers and anybody who happens to be connected. Smaller businesses can contact their ISPs about setting up a guest Wi-Fi network or creating a separate one that comes from the same router. This creates a separate location on the same Wi-Fi plan and keeps everything cleanly divided.
2. Consider your bandwidth. Do you have enough so business performance isn't affected with lots of extra users? I’m sure we have all experienced the frustration of a website page seemingly taking forever to load, so this could cause frustration to customers, but also consider that multiple users could slow down your business devices potentially causing delays to payment for example.
3. Regularly update firmware and security patches to protect against vulnerabilities. These updates may have fixes to vulnerabilities that would allow criminals to access the network and potentially intercept internet traffic.
4. Decide whether to use open access or require users to authenticate themselves via a captive portal, social media login, or password. Authentication can help with usage, marketing, and acceptance of policies.
5. To access the Wi-Fi, make sure you pick a good password that you haven’t used for anything else. This can be shared with customers, but we still suggest choosing three random words with special characters to make a memorable but secure password. And keep an eye out for duplicate or fake Wi-Fi addresses that may be pretending to be your network in an attempt to get customers to join it.
6. Finally, you will want to control the content that can be accessed from your premises. You do not want customers, which could include children, accessing inappropriate material such as adult content that could be offensive or violent. There is a free service that can help you check that you have the appropriate measures in place: Check Your Internet Connection Blocks Child Abuse & Terrorist Content (swgfl.org.uk)
For more information and guidance on becoming more cyber resilient, contact a member of our team today.