Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus in Devon
Cyber Essentials is the UK government backed certificate that shows your business has the basic security controls in place. Customers, insurers and public sector tenders increasingly ask for it.
IT WORKHOUSE takes businesses across the South Hams and Devon through it from start to finish, and we hold Cyber Essentials ourselves.
Cyber Essentials or Plus?
Cyber Essentials is a set of questions about your firewalls, device settings, user accounts, malware protection and software updates. Your answers are checked by an IASME certification body. The certificate lasts 12 months.
Cyber Essentials Plus covers the same five areas, but an assessor tests your systems instead of taking your word for it. They scan your network and check a sample of your devices and accounts. The Plus audit has to be done within three months of passing basic Cyber Essentials, so the two are best planned together.
If a contract or an insurer has asked for "Cyber Essentials", check which one they mean. Plus is the harder of the two and costs more.
What we do
Assess
We check your setup against the five control areas and tell you plainly what will fail.
Fix
We close the gaps: unsupported devices, missing updates, admin accounts in daily use, weak sign ins, firewalls left open.
Submit
We complete the questions with you and submit them. If the assessor comes back with questions, we answer them.
Prepare for Plus
For Plus we get every device in the sample ready, before the assessor tests them, so there are no surprises on the day.
Keep it
On a managed IT plan the controls stay in place all year, so renewal is a check rather than a scramble.
Bond Legal
Bond Legal, an employment law consultancy, asked us to handle their Cyber Essentials. We collected what we needed at the start so Simon's time was protected, then did the paperwork and answered the assessor's follow up questions. They have now passed two years running.
“Once we provided them with the necessary details, they completed all the paperwork for us.”
Simon Bond, Founder. Read the case study.
Questions we get asked
About 30 days from first call to certificate for Cyber Essentials, depending on how much needs fixing.
The certification body's fee depends on the size of your business. Give us a call and we will quote after a short conversation, with the certification fee and our work in one figure, so you know the total before we start. See what Cyber Essentials costs and how long it takes.
Central government contracts that handle personal information have required it since 2014, and many councils and larger companies now ask suppliers for it too.
No. We prepare you and do the work. The certificate is issued by an independent IASME certification body, which keeps the assessment impartial. We use CyberSmart.
Where we work
See every town and village in the areas we cover.
Talk to a local team
Call, email or fill in the form and one of the five of us will get back to you, usually within the hour.
Get in touch.
We'd love to hear from you. Whether you have questions, feedback, or need support, our team is here to help. Simply fill out the form and we usually respond within the hour.
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