A small office network without an IT person

The gap is packaging, not need

The risks a ten-person office faces are not smaller versions of enterprise risks. They are the same risks, arriving through the same routes, at an organisation with no security staff and no appetite for a product that assumes there is a team to run it.

What has historically been available is either a consumer router, which does not attempt the job, or an enterprise appliance, which assumes somebody will configure and maintain it. Neither fits.

What a small office actually needs

• Protection that does not need attention. Threats blocked at the gateway, reaching every device behind it, including the ones that cannot run security software: the camera, the printer, the card terminal.
• A second line that is actually used. A backup connection sitting idle is a line item, not a safeguard.
• Guests who are not on your network. A visitor should not share a network with your accounts machine.
• Remote access that does not open the office to the internet.

Failure has to be the safe direction

The most important property of security equipment in a place with no IT staff is what it does when it goes wrong. Protection that can take a business offline is a liability, whatever else it does well. EWUS gateways are built to fail open: if the software has a problem, the connection stays up.

EWUS Secure is the module for this: intrusion protection, two lines running together, isolated guest access, and a VPN server for working from elsewhere. Set up in an afternoon, not a project.