Retail and hospitality
IT support for shops, restaurants and hospitality businesses.
Point of sale, card payments and guest wi-fi — where an outage means turning customers away.
- PCI DSS
- Usually starts on Assured
- Backup included
Retail and hospitality is the sector where downtime is most immediately visible. If the point of sale is down or card payments will not process, you are turning away paying customers in real time. There is no catching up later on a Saturday lunch service.
The security shape is distinctive too. You are handling card payments, which brings PCI DSS obligations, and you are usually offering guest wi-fi, which means untrusted devices sitting on your premises all day. Those two facts need to be kept firmly apart from each other, and that is a network design question rather than an antivirus question.
What goes wrong
The failures that actually cost retail & hospitality businesses money
Not a generic threat list — these are the patterns we see repeatedly in this sector.
Point of sale outage equals lost revenue
When the till or card terminal stops during trading hours, the loss is immediate and unrecoverable. Peak periods are exactly when the system is under most load.
Card data and PCI obligations
Taking card payments brings PCI DSS requirements around network segmentation, access control and monitoring, and self-assessment questionnaires that have to be answered accurately.
Guest wi-fi as an open door
Public wi-fi on the same network as your tills and back office is a serious exposure. It needs to be genuinely separated, not just a different password.
High staff turnover
Shared logins and accounts that outlive the people who used them are the norm in this sector, and both make it impossible to tell who did what.
What we do about it
Each risk above, met with something specific
Mapped deliberately — every item here answers one of the failures on the previous list.
Separate the payment network from everything else
Point of sale and payment traffic on its own segment, guest wi-fi isolated from business systems entirely. This is the single most important control in a retail environment.
Monitoring on the connection you trade on
Internet and network monitoring so a degrading connection is spotted and dealt with before it takes payments down mid-service.
Managed firewall and content filtering
A properly configured, monitored firewall separating guest, staff and payment traffic — with the rules maintained rather than set once and forgotten.
Accounts that reflect who actually works there
Individual logins where the systems support it, and a leavers process that actually removes access, so audit trails mean something.
PCI DSS
What you are expected to be able to evidence
If you take card payments you have PCI DSS obligations, including segmenting the cardholder environment, controlling access and monitoring the network. We implement and document the network and security controls behind your self-assessment questionnaire.
How we document complianceWhere we would start you
Assured$105/user/mo
Payment network segmentation, guest wi-fi isolation and managed firewall are core needs here, and all three sit in Assured alongside priority response for trading-hours incidents.
Systems we support
What retail & hospitality businesses are usually running
We support the environment these run on, and work directly with your software vendor on application-specific problems.
- Point of sale and payment terminals
- Booking and reservation systems
- Inventory and stock management
- Guest wi-fi and captive portals
- Back-office accounting
Most relevant services
What retail & hospitality clients use most
Ordered by how often this sector actually needs them.
Straight answers
Retail & hospitality IT questions
Next step
Find out what is actually exposed — free, and no obligation
A 30-minute assessment of your backup, security and support gaps, with a written summary you keep whether or not you hire us.