The advice to fear public networks dates from a period when much of the web was unencrypted, and somebody on the same network could read what you were doing. That changed as encryption became standard, and the specific attack most warnings describe is now considerably harder to execute against ordinary browsing.
What remains is narrower. A network operator can see which sites you connect to even when they cannot read the contents. A fake network with a plausible name can capture traffic from anybody who joins it. And an out of date device with unpatched software is vulnerable on any network, which is a device problem rather than a network one.
The practical protections are ordinary and mostly things you should be doing regardless. Keep the device updated. Check that connections show as secure before entering anything. Do not dismiss certificate warnings, which are the one signal that genuinely indicates something wrong. And use two factor authentication, which means a captured password is not sufficient on its own.
Using your phone as a connection is the simplest answer for anybody uncertain, and it is available on nearly every plan. Mobile networks are encrypted by design, there is no unknown operator, and the arrangement removes the question entirely for the small amount of data most business tasks consume.
A commercial privacy service is a reasonable additional layer and it is frequently oversold. It moves the trust from the network operator to the service provider rather than eliminating it, and the marketing around this category routinely overstates what it protects against. If you use one, choose it on the provider's record rather than on the advertising.
Be careful about the situations that genuinely warrant more caution. Accessing banking or moving money, working with sensitive customer information, or logging into accounts that control your business are worth doing on a connection you trust rather than a hotel network. That is proportionality rather than fear.
Watch the physical risk as much as the technical one, since it is more likely and less discussed. Somebody reading your screen in a café, an unattended laptop, or a device without a lock screen are the realistic exposures in a public space, and none of them are addressed by anything technical.
Then turn off automatic connection to open networks, which is the setting most likely to cause a problem without anybody deciding anything. A device that joins any network matching a remembered name can be induced to connect to something you never chose, and disabling it takes a moment.
Lock your screen whenever you step away, even briefly, since an unattended unlocked device in a public space is the most likely exposure and none of the technical measures address it.
Turn off file sharing and network discovery on any device you take out, since those settings are appropriate on a home network and expose the device on an open one.
Use a privacy screen if you regularly work in public and handle anything sensitive, since shoulder surfing is the exposure that actually happens and it costs less than any software.
Review which networks your device has remembered periodically and remove anything you no longer use, since a saved network is one the device will rejoin automatically without asking.
Keep the number of devices you take out to what you actually need, since each one is a separate thing to keep updated, locked, and accounted for.