Cyber Essentials as a Service
Cyber Essentials as a Service allows businesses to maintain year-round compliance with the Cyber Essentials framework.
What is the Cyber Essentials Scheme?
Since 2020, 91% of businesses have seen an increase in cyber attacks as a result of employees working from home.
That’s why protecting endpoints is now more important than ever. But how do you ensure that endpoints are sufficiently protected when your teams are dispersed?
Cyber Essentials, including Cyber Essentials Plus can help.
Cyber Essentials is a collection of cyber security recommendations endorsed by the UK Government and embraced by many organisations across all industries. It outlines fundamental measures that organisations should implement to safeguard themselves, their teams, and their data from unauthorised intrusion and theft.
Cyber Essentials is now a cyber security best practice.
By obtaining the annual Cyber Essentials accreditation, you demonstrate that you have taken steps to protect yourself against cyber threats and are committed to good cyber security practices, assuring your customers, suppliers, and partners that you continue to take necessary steps to protect their data and IT systems.
As well as aligning your business to Cyber Essentials/Cyber Essentials Plus, you should ensure that any supplier, partner, or vendor that you work with also has the Cyber Essentials Accreditation, especially if they will be handling any of your data.
There are two types of Cyber Essentials Certifications:
- Cyber Essentials, which is self-certified
- Cyber Essentials Plus, when an external assessor ensures that you meet the outlined requirements, including Cyber Essentials Plus requirements.
Cyber Essentials as a Service
Cyber Essentials is an annual certification that you must renew once a year and during that time, certain controls may fall out of scope as its difficult to monitor these controls without regular and manual checks
Cyber Essentials as a Service is a solution that allows you to maintain year-round compliance for all your endpoints against the Cyber Essentials requirements, including Cyber Essentials Plus. This service is fully managed by Sharp, meaning you can focus on your core operations while ensuring that your cyber security, including Cyber Essentials/Plus accreditation, is in good hands.
As part of your onboarding to Cyber Essentials as a Service, we will run a gap analysis of your entire IT environment, highlighting the areas where you currently fall short of the Cyber Essentials requirements. We will then propose the necessary work that will need to be undertaken to get your organisation compliant so that you pass your Cyber Essentials/Cyber Essentials Plus accreditation with flying colours.
Key Benefits of Cyber Essentials as a Service
Security Culture
Promotes a positive security culture.
Year-round Compliancy
Maintains device compliancy and cyber security.
Faster Recertification
Facilitates faster Cyber Essentials recertification.
How does Cyber Essentials as a Service work?
Through incorporated software we can monitor compliancy throughout the year, with ongoing remediation across all of your organisation’s endpoints, ensuring that your entire IT estate adheres to the Cyber Essential requirements all year round. We will also proactively remediate any issues that may arise.
We stay on top of any advances regarding Cyber Essentials and every 6 months, we will look at any new requirements, including Cyber Essentials Plus requirements, and let you know if there is anything that needs to be done to meet these.
Cyber Essentials is updated annually with new requirements, so it is important that these are reviewed and any remediation is proactively proposed, to ensure you adopt the new requirements before the next submission.
Key Features of Cyber Essentials as a Service
An endpoint agent desktop/laptop & mobile app that continually monitors your devices are protected and are compliant with the Cyber Essentials requirements, including Cyber Essentials Plus requirements. If an endpoint falls out of scope, Sharp will proactively remediate the issues to bring the device back to a compliant state. New employees and devices can be brought quickly into the scope of Cyber Essentials with the installation of this agent and the necessary compliance configured.
The dashboard will provide you will an entire overview of your endpoint estate and their compliance levels, including Cyber Essentials accreditation. It allows our support team to provide 24/7 monitoring of your Cyber Essentials endpoint compliance. Your annual Cyber Essentials questionnaire is within the dashboard, allowing you to review your status and results.
We’ll upload and manage your company’s policies on the online dashboard, which will make these available to all employees via their Monitoring agent. Employees can read & agree to policies via the agent on their desktop or mobile devices. Your business can keep track of policy agreement for every employee right within your dashboard, so you can be assured that everyone has read and understood them.
The academy provides guidance to keep your employees, systems and data secure. As 90% of breaches are from human error, it is important to ensure they’re trained to recognise common threats. Team progress can be reviewed via a company-wide league table.
At around the midway point of your current Cyber Essentials achievement, we will review any additional requirements. Cyber Essentials updates annually with new requirements, so it is important that these are reviewed and any remediation proposed to ensure you adopt the new requirements before the next submission.
Why Cyber Essentials as a Service and not just Cyber Essentials?
Whilst having Cyber Essentials certification demonstrates good practice and covers you for a year, unless you are proactively monitoring your systems, you just don’t know if your devices are compliant throughout the year until you next renew your Cyber Essentials certification.
With Cyber Essentials as a Service, Sharp will make sure that you are in line with the Cyber Essentials requirements 24/7 365, so that you don’t fall out of scope and become more vulnerable to a cyber attack.
Awards & Accreditations
Cyber Essentials PLUS
CyberSmart Advanced Partner