Running a business from home: what to separate and why

The spare-room office is the most common small business setup in the Bay Area, and the most commonly under-protected. The equipment is fine. The arrangement is the problem.

What you're actually protecting

Be specific about it, because the answer shapes everything else:

• Client data. Names, addresses, financial details, health information, anything you'd have to disclose losing.
• Payment systems. Card readers, point-of-sale terminals, anything touching a transaction.
• Access credentials. The saved logins on your work machine, which are usually the real prize.
• Uptime. For some businesses an outage is an inconvenience. For others it's lost revenue per hour.

If you handle regulated data — medical, legal, financial — your obligations may extend to how it's stored and transmitted. That's a conversation for your professional body or your attorney, not your WiFi installer. But the network side is the part most people neglect, and it's the cheapest to fix.

The practical arrangement

Work devices on their own network. Separate name, separate password, no visibility into the rest of the house. If a family device is compromised, your business isn't.

Wire the desk if you possibly can. A cable to the work computer is faster, lower latency, and immune to the interference that makes video calls stutter. For anyone who lives on calls, this is the single highest-value change.

Give work traffic priority. Most business-class equipment can favour video-call traffic over streaming. That's what stops a teenager's download from ruining a client meeting.

Put customer-facing WiFi somewhere else entirely. If clients visit, they go on the guest side, not the business network. A studio, salon or office with public WiFi should never have visitors and payment systems in the same space.

Think about what happens when the internet drops

Ask yourself what an outage during business hours costs. If the answer is "nothing much," ignore this. If the answer is real money, you have options:

• Cellular backup. Some gateways have it built in and switch over automatically. Others take a small add-on antenna.
• A second provider. Cable plus fibre, or cable plus fixed wireless. More expensive, more resilient.
• A documented fallback. Sometimes the honest answer is "tether to my phone and know how to do it before I need to."

Decide this deliberately rather than discovering it mid-outage.

The boring things that matter more than they sound

Write down what's on your network. A one-page list of devices, what they are, and which network they're on. When something misbehaves, this is the difference between five minutes and an afternoon.

Change the default passwords. On everything — cameras especially. Default credentials on internet-connected cameras remain one of the most exploited weaknesses in small business networks.

Keep firmware current. Business-class equipment can update itself on a schedule. Consumer gear often can't, and stops receiving updates entirely after a few years.

Know where your recordings go. If you have cameras, know whether footage lives on a drive in your building or on someone else's server, and whether that's acceptable for your business.

How far is far enough

For most home businesses — a consultant, a designer, a bookkeeper, a contractor running estimates from a laptop — separating work from home, wiring the desk, and prioritising call traffic covers the realistic risks.

If you take card payments on site, add isolation for the payment device specifically. If you have staff coming to the property, they need their own access that isn't your household password.

Beyond that you're into territory where the right answer depends on your industry's rules rather than general good practice, and it's worth asking someone who knows your sector.