Anyone Rent an Office With Shared Internet?
 

Ive been looking at offices and almost every single one has internet included in the lease. These are fairly good sized office buildings with 100+ individual offices, rented one at a time or in groups.

Anyone here lease an office with shared internet and what percussion do you take to make sure your clients info you are sharing via the net is secure?

SSL of course, secure VPN to/from your servers

I don't know how much does Internet cost for you, but just use your own. If they offer shared Internet, just consider it a backup, but it's always smart to keep your stuff in control

use a password that's not in the dictionary!

Qoute:

"Anyone Rent an Office With Shared Internet?"

Reply:

No one with any sense leases out their internet.

And non one with any sense rents an office on that basis.

This is pretty common place these days. Buildings want to make money from every aspect. Someone I know owns a local ISP that providers Internet service and hosted VOIP buildings to about 90 in Manhattan. He deals a lot with incubator spaces. The internet is usually pretty good. Find out how much bandwidth they are providing to each space. You can usually get more or less for a certain price.

They usually give an ethernet handoff. Just get a small Cisco Firewall. An ASA 5505. Anything that you are publishing via the web should be does via SSL anyway. If you want someone to come in and grab info, just have them do it via VPN (which can be setup on the ASA).

There's not much difference, really, except maybe for incoming connections, if they use
private IPs. If you pay the ISP directly for a connection in your office, they still bring the
connections together in a wiring closet somewhere. If you have a your own free standing
building, you are in fact sharing a connection with the other people on your street. Whether
the lines connect in the basement or at the end of the street doesn't much matter.

There are two ways that it can be set up. You can get a regular IP, if the ISP provides a pool
of IPs to the building, or you could get a private network IP, where the whole building has just
one public IP. If you get a public IP (an IP from the ISP), for all intents and purposes it's the
same thing as if you paid the ISP directly. If it's a private IP such as 196.168.x.x or 10.0.x.x,
you may have difficulty connection from your home to your office, and because with regular
FTP the server actually connects back to the client, you may need to use passive FTP.

Either way, assuming you have multiple computers which share data you'll probably want
to use your own router, in order to create your own private network within the building or
ISP network. When connecting outside of your own network and working with sensitive
data, you'll use encryption such as SSL, SSH, ftps, GPG, etc. That's the same as what
you're used to, where neighbors can often snoop on your unsecured traffic.

We'd suggest a two layered approach. It's probably a good idea to set your mail client
to use SSL/TLS for POP3, but also identify the sensitive data and encrypt it. For example,
we use GPG when sending credit card information through email, even though our email
connection uses SSL. That way the sensitive data has two levels of protection - the
standard encryption applied to all POP3 traffic, plus the GPG that's used for sensitive emails.