Why should you get Cyber Essentials

Today in 2023, its unheard of, of a company operating and having absolutely no connection to the internet or email. No matter what size company or what type of service your business operates there will be some form of internet connectivity in play.

Even if you don’t have connectivity to the internet, there are still risks to your business, whether it’s from an inside threat, someone picking up a USB stick and plugging it into a machine, an infected drive. You name it, the threat is there and its real and threats are not just related to the internet.

The Cyber Essentials scheme applies five technical controls which allow businesses to apply the best practices to their business and further protect them from threats. By applying these technical controls your business can be further protected from attacks, whether internet based or from inside the business.

The five technical controls are :

• Firewalls
• Secure configuration
• User access control
• Malware protection
• Security update management

Each technical control ensures that systems are protected against threats, whether its blocking communication around the network via firewalls, to ensuring that best practices are implemented, and default configurations are changed – such as default administration passwords. Or ensuring that users are not running as a local administrator, which is the default setting and then ensuring that updates are applied not only to Operating Systems, but all applications as well.

Through the configuration of these controls, your business can be a lot safer against attacks and therefore help comply with protecting data and showing trust to your customers, suppliers and partners.

The Cyber Essentials scheme comes in two levels and the basic self-assessment certification doesn’t cost the earth and is certainly cheaper than a data breach or ransomware attack, so what’s not to lose?

A lot of tenders, supply chains and finance companies are now also asking for companies to be certified to Cyber Essentials basic or plus, so by implementing Cyber Essentials you are getting ahead of your competition and showing commitment to securing data.

So with all that in mind, what’s stopping you achieving Cyber Essentials and looking after your data and implementing the best practices.

If you’d like to go for Cyber Essentials, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us to see how we can help your business.