What is Cyber Essentials? Keep Your Birmingham-based Business Safe

Is your organisation safe from cyber crime?

Are you sure?

Unfortunately, in this day and age, the internet is not a safe place. From phishing scams to email scams, ransomware to data breaches, someone with the wrong intentions can make a victim out of your business without ever even interacting with you or your staff.

If you’ve not made extra efforts to protect your organisation from cybercrime, you’re likely in one of three camps:

1. You don’t think your organisation would be hit by a cyber attack. Either your staff are too smart to fall for one, or your organisation isn’t large enough to be a target.
2. You think it’s too much effort or too expensive to put processes in place when there’s only a small chance you’ll actually face a cyber attack.
3. You think cybercrime is overblown and doesn’t happen as often as people claim.

Do you fit into one of these three? If so, read on because here at Hubtel IT, we have helped many organisations (including businesses, schools and charities) all become Cyber Essentials accredited, making them so much more resilient in the event of a cyber attack.

What is Cyber Essentials?

Supported by the UK Government, Cyber Essentials helps organisations, regardless of size, in the implementation of processes that protect them from potential cyber threats.

Cyber crime is not like traditional crime in the sense that it’s often rarely directly targeted at a single organisation. Instead, cyber criminals will cast a wide net with bots to find potential weaknesses in systems. These bots are very basic in nature and are often managed by people who know very little about the inner workings of your network.

Think of it like someone sending a thousand people around town at night to try and open every car door. All they need to do is find one unlucky person who left their car unlocked and they’ve succeeded. So all it takes is a few simple processes, and suddenly you have dealt with 99.9% of cyber attacks.

In short, Cyber Essentials accreditation identifies, remedies and removes the basic vulnerabilities that cause the vast majority of cyber threats.

Levels of Cyber Essentials certification

Cyber Essentials comes in two levels of certification: Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus.

On an implementation level, these two aren’t different. All the protections you might have in place to become Cyber Essentials accredited will count towards you getting Cyber Essentials Plus accredited. For Cyber Essentials Plus accreditation, you need a hands-on technical verification to be carried out by a cyber security expert.

To become Cyber Essentials accredited, you or your IT provider/department will have to fill out a questionnaire and send it off to a Cyber Essentials assessor. If the answers from this questionnaire are compliant with Cyber Essentials – congratulations! Your organisation will be given the Cyber Essentials certificate.

However, it’s worth noting that the questionnaire is not suited to everyone; an understanding of how the cyber security of your organisation is configured is needed. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to self-certify, and this investment of time can make sure your business has the right protections. But if you think the fact that getting Cyber Essentials accreditation is simple makes it worth less to consumers and suppliers, that’s where Cyber Essentials Plus comes in.

With Cyber Essentials Plus, you must first become Cyber Essentials certified, at which point you have 90 days to achieve Cyber Essentials Plus. For this, a technical assessor will test your systems and network to make sure the answers you provided in your Cyber Essentials questionnaire are accurate.

These both need to be renewed every 12 months to make sure your organisation stays on top of their cyber security goals.

Why not get started?

If you’re still cynical about Cyber Essentials, you might soon not get a choice. If your organisation bids on any government contract that involves handling sensitive and personal information or the provision of certain technical products and services, it’s highly likely that you will need to be Cyber Essentials certified. And it’s also likely that this standard is going to trickle into other industries too, with large enterprises probably not wanting to work with businesses that haven’t taken these simple steps to combat cybercrime.

Cyber Essentials isn’t just about protecting your organisation and its data. With a Cyber Essentials Accreditation, your staff, customers, and users can rest assured that if you’re handling their data, it will be safe.

Taking just a few steps is going to make you more trustworthy to your clients, customers and users and it will make sure your organisation is more protected from cyber criminals.

If you’re interested in knowing more, get in touch with us today. Our cyber security experts are happy to help guide you through the process, as we have with many of our clients already – see our case study here.