Cyber Essentials 2020 question set retirement notice

Cyber Essentials goes through updates and recently the self-assessment questions underwent an annual review and were updated in April 2021. Now that several months have past and the majority of applicants have completed their older 2020 questions, IASME has decided to retire the older questions.

So what does this mean for you the applicant? If you are still using the questions from 2020 you will need to contact your assigned Certification Body to ask them to update/migrate your questions to the newer ‘Beacon’ question set. This can currently be done free of charge until the 29th October 2021. After this time any 2020 question sets will be removed from the online portals, if you want to continue with your Cyber Essentials self-assessment after this time and you have not upgraded your questions it may be provided at additional cost.

Why is this happening? Cyber security evolves, there are constant threats emerging and the security of companies needs to keep on evolving. Because of this the Cyber Essentials scheme now undergoes annual reviews and where necessary new questions will be added, or questions will be changed to make the process easier.

If you are unsure of what questions you are using, you can log into the Cyber Essentials Portal and it will will either say ‘Cyber Essentials 2020’ or ‘Cyber Essentials (Beacon)’ on the tab towards to the top left of the screen. If you still can’t work out what you are on, contact your Certification Body for more information.