What is Cyber Essentials?
About Cyber Essentials
Cyber Essentials helps you make your business more resilient against cyber-attacks. It's a government-backed scheme. Like an MOT, you pay a fee to the agency that checks whether you meet the standard, and this fee also gives most organisations free insurance, and support in the event of an attack.
Achieving Cyber Essentials allows you to guard your organisation against the most common cyber threats and helps you to demonstrate your commitment to cyber resilience for your customers and staff.
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If the thought of a fee is off-putting, contact us and we can let you know how to do some self-assessment.
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The two levels of certification
There are two levels of certification. For cyber essentials, you and/or your IT partner gathers information for a questionnaire covering aspects of risk. Your responses are then checked to see whether you meet the relevant standards, and you can re-submit if necessary. For cyber essentials 'plus', there is a greater level of direct scrutiny, and a greater level of assurance.
CYBER ESSENTIALS
The first tier of Cyber Essentials is a self-assessment option which gives you resilience against a wide variety of the most common cyber-attacks. Your organisation can assess themselves against five basic security controls and a qualified assessor can verify the information provided. This includes using firewalls, having secure configuration in place, software patching and having secure user and administration accounts.
Achieving Cyber Essentials allows you to:
Make your organisation more resilient against the most common forms of cyber-attacks.
Demonstrate a commitment to cyber security to your customers and clients with a certificate and badge to display in your premises and website.
Access free insurance and support as a qualifying organisation.
You can achieve Cyber Essentials with the help of our Trusted Partners group.
CYBER ESSENTIALS PLUS
The second tier of Cyber Essentials is Cyber Essentials Plus. Cyber Essentials Plus offers the same simplistic approach as the first tier, but also involves physical tests to your network and computers by independent professionals. Successful accreditation of Cyber Essentials Plus provides a higher level of assurance that your organisation has a strong cyber resilience regime with correctly implemented controls in place to maintain a robust defence against cyber-attacks.
With Cyber Essentials Plus, you can:
Attract new business with the assurance you have cyber security measures in place.
Demonstrate a commitment to cyber security to your customers and clients with an enhanced certificate and badge to display in your premises and website.
Attract new government contracts that require Cyber Essentials Plus certification.
You can achieve Cyber Essentials Plus with the help of our Trusted Partners group.