IT support and security
Cyber Essentials
A UK government-backed certification confirming a business has five basic technical security controls in place, assessed by questionnaire.
What cyber Essentials means in practice
The five controls are boundary firewalls, secure configuration, access control, malware protection and patch management. None of them are advanced, which is rather the point: the scheme exists to raise the floor rather than the ceiling, and it blocks the commodity attacks that make up most of what a small business faces.
Its commercial value is often larger than its security value. Public sector tenders and a growing number of private contracts require it, and increasingly so do cyber insurance policies. The certification itself is a fixed fee; the cost that catches people out is the remediation needed to answer the questions honestly, which is where an unmanaged estate gets expensive. Budget for the assessment and the fixing as one number.
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