How (and Why) Your Business Should Have a Guest Wi-Fi Network

It’s not uncommon for your office visitors to need access to your wireless network. Whether it’s a client or a contractor, you want to make things convenient for people, but not at the expense of your network’s security. After all, how can you know their devices aren’t infected by a malware that can spread to your network and impact operations?

This is why businesses segment their wireless networks. Today, we’ll show you why this is a good idea.

Your Digital Fence: Network Segmentation

The last thing you want is to be unhelpful when your clients or contractors ask for the wireless password, so instead of saying, “No thanks, you’re a security threat,” you can instead use network segmentation to be smart about sharing these credentials.

Through segmentation, you split your office Internet into two or more different lanes that don’t interact with each other. This is like having a guest network for your visitors while keeping anything operational isolated from the rest. This helps you keep important business assets, like company files, sensitive data, or office printers, safe from whoever connects to the guest network.

Safeguard Bandwidth and Performance

A guest network prioritizes both security and performance for your business network. Sometimes a video call might lag or a file might take a while to upload because you have too many customers or clients in the lobby using the network. If you don’t have segmentation in place, they’re all using the same network and “clogging it up” with whatever they are doing.

A guest network remedies this by helping you control the speed, or bandwidth, your visitors use.  Guests can stream high-definition video or take their own video calls in the lobby without it impacting your team’s ability to do their own work. In other words, the priority lane is always your business traffic, but you still give guests what they need.

Office Wi-Fi Best Practices

First, you’ll need to get that guest network set up. We recommend the following best practices and professional standards to make sure you get it right the first time:

• Unique passwords - Your guest wireless network should always have a different password than your internal network, and it should be changed periodically so you always have control.
• Enable device isolation - With this setting enabled, your guests can see your network, but they can’t see each other’s devices. This is an additional layer of security for your customers that also protects them from seeing the contents of other guests’ devices.
• Hide the internal SSID - Your internal network for staff shouldn’t be visible to guests, so make sure it stays out of sight.

Start Securing Your Connection

Your wireless network can be an amazing tool for getting work done, but it shouldn’t be an invitation for any and all visitors to impede on your office resources. To keep it from becoming a security liability, contact RiverTrail Technology at (276) 601-3208.