Most small business networks were set up to work — not to be secure. Everything on one flat network. POS on the same subnet as employee laptops. Guest Wi-Fi sharing firewall rules with production servers. It all works until someone plugs in a compromised device, and suddenly the attacker has unrestricted lateral movement across everything.

Real network security is about architecture — segmenting so a compromise in one area doesn’t reach everything, deploying firewalls that actually inspect traffic, and monitoring for suspicious activity before it becomes a breach.