Get your business ready to pass Cyber Essentials without the scramble. We work through the five controls with you, fix what needs fixing, and have your answers ready before you apply.
Price: From £695. Excludes the certification body’s own assessment fee.
How long: Usually two to four weeks, depending on what needs changing. Who it is for: Small businesses whose clients, insurers or tender documents have started asking for it.
Cyber Essentials is the government-backed scheme, run by IASME on behalf of the NCSC, that more and more clients and insurers expect a supplier to hold. It asks you to have five basic controls in place and to answer honestly about them.
Most small businesses are further along than they think, and stuck on the same two or three points. The work is rarely difficult. Knowing which questions are really being asked, and what counts as an acceptable answer, is the part that trips people up.
We go through your devices, cloud services and working setup, including staff who work from home and anyone using their own phone for work. Scope is what most applications get wrong, so we settle it first.
You get the gaps written down in order of what matters, with an honest note on which ones you can do yourself and which are worth paying for.
We can roll out multi-factor authentication, sort a password manager, tidy up admin accounts and retire software that no longer gets updates. Or we can point and you can do it. Whichever is cheaper for you.
We prepare your responses to the self-assessment so the wording matches what the assessor is looking for, and you are not guessing on the day.
We cannot issue the certificate, and nobody who prepares you can. Cyber Essentials is awarded by a certification body licensed by IASME, who mark your self-assessment independently. We also cannot promise a pass: the answers have to be true, and if something is not in place we will tell you rather than word around it. What we can do is make sure there are no surprises.
Open the free checklist: Our free readiness checklist covers scope and all five controls in thirty plain-English questions. Work through it and you will know whether this is a fortnight of work or an afternoon.