Nine desks, one network
It happened — 2026CoworkingCafe Q1 2026
Greater London now has 1,209 coworking spaces — the densest flex market in Europe — and 46% of small businesses identified a cyber attack last year. A flex-space company's entire attack surface is a laptop fleet on someone else's network.
Your version has nine desks at a good address and no IT person, because at nine people nobody hires one. Microsoft 365 was set up in an afternoon three years ago and hasn't been looked at since. Half the laptops belong to the company, half to the people using them, and the office WiFi belongs to the building — taken on faith. Passwords live in a shared note titled, honestly, Passwords. All of it works, right up until a laptop goes missing, a mailbox starts sending strange invoices, or a big client's procurement pack asks how you manage security — and someone has to write an answer.
This is you if Nobody set up M365/Google beyond the defaults; the office network belongs to the building, not to you; your password system is a shared document.
How we run it
We start from the honest premise: no network is yours.
In a shared building the network is the landlord's, so we don't build your security on it. Everything that matters moves to the devices and accounts you actually own — which, conveniently, is also the setup that travels with you to the café and home.
The thirty-minute look-around happens early.
Usually while we're fixing whatever broke first — that tends to be how we meet. Half an hour checking the things that decide how bad a bad day gets: multi-factor sign-in, disk encryption, who owns which laptop, and what happens if one walks out.
Then the baseline goes on, device by device.
A second check at sign-in everywhere, so a stolen password is worthless on its own. Encryption verified rather than assumed. Remote wipe enrolled — personal machines included, with a short written agreement, so nobody's own laptop gets wiped without having said yes to the idea first.
And we write you the one-pager.
A plain security summary you can paste into any client questionnaire that arrives. For a nine-person firm chasing bigger clients, that single page closes deals.
Made boring by: Core — the whole baseline above is our onboarding checklist, not an extra. For nine people that's £351 a month: about a third of one desk at London's average rate. Core · from £39/user/month
Real figures: CoworkingCafe Q1 2026, CSBS 2025/26. The nine-person firm is illustrative.