With many of us now working from home, it’s worth understanding whether our domestic internet connections are a good fit for business purposes

Back in March 2020, employees around the world were locked out of their offices and told to stay and work from home. They were mostly armed with corporate-issued laptops and mobile devices, and expected to carry on with work from home.

All seems fine, right? A number of employees were likely working in a more agile fashion, meaning less time spent in the office, and a lot less time spent at the same desk.

There is one major concern to this setup, though: how secure is the home wireless network?

It’s likely built to be strong enough to provide high-quality internet so you can run streaming services, browse the web, and use your devices. But aside from these more consumer uses, is home wi-fi good enough for corporate use? And, if not, is it time businesses considered this?

The next stage

Quentyn Taylor, director of information security at Canon Europe, says the next stage of remote working will be where companies care about the internet connection their employees have. He cited an example where a person he was talking to was unable to retrieve his details as their internet connection was not fast enough. “The point is we are in emergency mode,” he says, “and when we come out of it and out of lockdown and back to business as usual, not having fast enough internet will no longer be acceptable.”

Taylor says there being no regulation on broadband was correct, but there should be more standardization on the quality and speed. He also says that as businesses are saving money on office internet cabling, HVAC and replacing office services like phones and printers with home-printing options, this will be a sensible investment area. “Some companies have a transient workforce, and industry will look to them to see what worked and how they set it up.”

How secure is your wi-fi?

The dilemma here is about the security of consumer wi-fi: Is it at a level where employees are actually secure, or are they working on (mostly) secure devices, connecting via consumer wi-fi to sensitive data?

A recent survey by OneLogin of 2,000 remote workers based in the US and UK found that 28% have worked on a public and “potentially unsecured wi-fi since the move to remote working.”

Ken Munro, partner at Pen Test Partners, said he does not have any particular issue with home wi-fi being used for remote working, “so long as there’s dedicated corporate hardware – like a laptop, VPN, certificates and strong or multi-factor authentication to it.” He recommends replacing the ISP router “with something you have more control over,” and says “a hardware firewall between the router and your home network would also be wise.”

Essentially, this is about finding a way out of a situation that many people were put in, and for businesses to determine what the agility of their employees will be when lockdown comes to an end. Lisa Forte, partner at Red Goat Cyber Security, said m