If your business is looking to:
- Improve its cyber security by guarding against the most common cyber threats.
- Signal to potential customers, partners and suppliers that your business takes cyber security seriously.
- Benefit from inclusive cyber liability insurance.
A Cyber Essentials certification could be the way forward.
What is Cyber Essentials?
Cyber Essentials is a government-backed scheme for organisations of all sizes designed to help you protect against common forms of cyber-attack. It does this by promoting the continual strengthening of our business’s cyber defences through a regular independently verified self-assessment audit.
What are the benefits of Cyber Essentials?
Customers and contracts
By gaining a Cyber Essentials certificate, you will signal to potential customers and clients that your business is serious about guarding against cyber threats that could affect them.
Cyber Essentials certification can also open businesses up to a wider spectrum of supply contracts, particularly government department and local authority contracts. Given the increasing risk of cyber-attacks through supply chains, Cyber Essentials certification has become a minimum baseline for many organisations.
Cyber Liability Insurance
Once a business gains a Cyber Essentials certification, it will qualify for free cyber liability insurance. An outgoing that is becoming ever more costly for businesses as cyber threats continue to increase and transform.
Reducing costly cyber attacks
Cyber attacks can cost a business dearly, ranging from revenue loss and reputational damage to ransomware attacks and costly fines for data breaches.
The Cyber Essentials certification process guides businesses through the key controls that will improve cyber security by significantly reducing their vulnerability to cyber threats.
Getting your Cyber Essentials certification
Cyber Essentials is a self-assessment process that includes a series of questions about your organisation’s systems, policies, access controls, work location, and current security measures.
Businesses pay a fee based on their organisation’s size to take the assessment, but you can access the questions for free beforehand to ensure you are prepared in advance.
Once you’ve completed the questionnaire, it will need to be reviewed by a qualified practitioner. They’ll go through every detail and point out any areas that need improvement or changes. These issues will need to be fixed before you receive certification.
Working with a Cyber Essentials specialist
Ensuring your business meets the Cyber Essentials standard can be tricky and time-consuming, especially for SMEs where IT resources may already be stretched. Working with a Cyber Essentials specialist can ease the process and speed up certification.
If your business requires a more comprehensive certification, SDT can also help you to become Cyber Essentials Plus certified. This follows a similar process to Cyber Essentials but also includes a technical audit of your IT systems.
Find out more
If you would like to discuss your business’s cyber security, Cyber Essentials certification or any other aspects of this article, please get in touch with us here.