Cyber Essentials

What is Cyber Essentials?

Cyber Essentials is a government information assurance scheme that encourages businesses to adopt a set of good practices in relation to information security to provide protection from a range of cyber attacks. 

By adopting the good practices that Cyber Essentials requires, it is estimated to protect you and your business to an estimated 80% of the current cyber attacks. It’s no longer if you’ll have a cyber attack, it’s a matter of when.

Many companies have invested other schemes like the ISO standards to improve their business processes and good practice. The Cyber Essentials certification demonstrates to your supply chain, customers or clients that you take the protection of your and their data seriously and differentiating you from your peers.

The scheme is operated by National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the IASME consortium. Together they are promoting and raising awareness of the cyber security threats faced by organisations and the increase of businesses taking proactive steps to ensure they are protected from these threats.

How would Cyber Essentials benefit my organisation?

Cyber attacks come in many forms such as malware, phishing, hackers and ransomware costing businesses both reputationally and financially.

The vast majority of attacks (80%) on businesses use the most basic techniques. It’s specifically these types of attacks that Cyber Essentials aims to protect against.

Protecting against these attacks is vitally important because once a business is seen by hackers to be vulnerable to the most basic of cyber threats it is considered to be a soft target to more profitable and more complex cyber attacks.

It’s no longer if you’ll have a cyber attack / breach, it’s a matter of when.

What difference will Cyber Essentials make to my business?

• Allows you to attract new business with the confirmation you have cyber security measures in place.
• Reassure customers and suppliers you are working hard to secure your IT against cyber attack. Demonstrates you’ve thought about the risks and put policies in place to secure your and their data.
• Gives a thorough view of your organisations cyber security level.
• More and more businesses are asking for Cyber Essentials from their suppliers in order to carry on working together. Having Cyber Essentials in place also allows you to bid for local and central government contracts.
• Once you’ve got Cyber Essentials you can get a FREE basic cyber insurance policy. This covers you for up to £25,000 or it can reduce your premiums of cyber security insurance against increased cover.

What would obtaining Cyber Essentials entail?

Cyber Essentials is a two level certification programme which starts with Cyber Essentials and then goes on to to Cyber Essentials Plus.

Amshire can take you through the Cyber Essentials assessment process in a matter of days depending on the information and practices that you have in place. We work with you to understand your business and IT processes to see how we can adjust your existing policies. We do this through a couple of meetings or calls together with an audit of your IT environment. Once we have all the information Amshire make holistic recommendations to allow you to achieve Cyber Essentials accreditation.

After achieving Cyber Essentials, Amshire can work with you to upgrade your accreditation to Cyber Essentials Plus which entails a hands on technical verification of procedures, processes and technologies.

Regardless of which certification you work towards, Amshire works hard to get you accredited first time by working with the assessor to verify your processors and policies prior to submission.

Contact Amshire to find out how we can help you.