Safer Business
Make Your Business Safer ... with Cyber Essentials
In an increasingly competitive landscape, your business must stand out as a safe and reliable choice. No company is too large or too small to be at risk from cyber criminals and threats like ransomware or fraud.
However, there's a straightforward way to better protect your business and demonstrate to customers, prospects, and employees that your IT security is both robust and compliant. By partnering with a Cyber Essentials accredited provider like the Safer Security Group, you can achieve certification through the UK Cyber Essentials scheme. As a recognized Cyber Essentials assessor, we help businesses become Cyber Essentials certified companies, proving that you're a safer business to work with.
You can have a safer business by employing just five simple controls.
Let us help...
In an increasingly competitive landscape, your business needs to stand out and be an easy and safe choice to work with.
No business today is too large or too small to be at risk from cyber criminals and threats such as ransomware or fraud.
Yet, there's a straightforward way to better protect your business AND prove to your customers, prospects and people that your IT security is robust and compliant... to prove that you're a Safer Business to work with...
You can have a safer business by employing just five simple controls. Let us help...
Cyber Essentials
Since 2016, we have served as an IASME-accredited Certification Body to conduct assessments and certifications for the Cyber Essentials / Plus IT Security compliance standards in the UK.
SBRC and
Police Scotland
Trusted Partner
As an original Trusted
Partner member of the Scottish Business
Resilience Centre, we conduct IT security reviews and provide appropriate recommendations for Small & Medium Businesses in Scotland.
IASME Governance Audited
Grant McGregor Ltd is an IASME-accredited Certification Body to conduct assessments and certifications for the IASME Gold IT Governance and Security compliance standard in the UK.
What is Cyber Essentials
Cyber Essentials Plus is the next level after achieving Cyber Essentials Certification. While it builds on the same five technical controls as Cyber Essentials, it requires organisations to undergo a detailed audit of their self-assessment submission. This advanced certification, known as Cyber Security Essentials Plus, offers a deeper evaluation of your security measures.
The National Cyber Security Centre, a part of GCHQ, operates the Cyber Essentials scheme as part of its mission to “make the UK one of the safest places to live and do business online”.
Cyber Essentials (CE) has been designed to help UK businesses protect themselves against cyberattacks and put cyber security within reach of the vast majority of UK organisations.
Cyber Essentials is completed through self-assessment, although organisations can enlist the help of a Certification Body to guide them through the self-assessment process.
The self-assessment must then be independently verified by a Cyber Essentials Certification Body, such as Grant McGregor.
Why should my organisation consider Cyber Essentials?
- Enhanced security measures
- Simple and cost effective
- Gain and retain business
- Demonstrate your commitment to cyber security
- Small firms benefit from Cyber Liability Insurance
What is Cyber Essentials Plus?
Cyber Essentials Plus is the step after you become Cyber Essentials Certified. It is based on the same five technical controls as Cyber Essentials but requires organisations to be audited against their CE self-assessment submission.
Where Cyber Essentials Plus differs is that it requires a technical audit across the scope of assessment.
This assessment must be completed by an accredited Cyber Essentials Plus Assessor.
The assessor will review and appraise a representative set of user devices, all Internet gateways and all servers accessible to Internet users. Typically, the assessor will select a random sample of systems, usually equivalent to around ten percent of the total devices/systems used.
It is this extra physical appraisal that gives the Cyber Essentials Plus certification a greater level of assurance than the Cyber Essentials certification alone.
However, either is well worth having: the Cyber Essentials certification not only helps to focus your organisation on the important issue of cyber security, it also demonstrates your commitment to good cyber security to your potential customers, partners, regulatory bodies and other stakeholders.
About Grant McGregor as a
Cyber Essentials Certification Body
We became an accredited IASME Certification Body for Cyber Essentials (CE) and Cyber Essentials Plus back in 2016.
Since then we have created a strong and long-standing relationship with the National Cyber Security Centre’s (NCSC) sole Accreditation Body, IASME. We are an early adopter of the scheme in Scotland as a key member of the Scottish Business Resilience Centre.
Since 2016, we have helped over 100 different businesses and organisations to prepare and/or certify for Cyber Essentials / Plus, including:
- Government bodies such as the Scottish Public Pensions Agency and the Office for the Scottish Charity Regulator
- Housing Associations and Charities
- Large and small businesses including accountants, legal practices, manufacturers and more.
Our fully qualified in-house Cyber Assessors are all seasoned IT professionals who live and breathe IT in the daily service work we do for hundreds of other companies supporting their systems, staff and security. Because they are not “compliance consultants”, our Assessors don’t simply tell you what needs to be done. They will often guide you on how you can do it.
Finally, a word of caution...
As the scheme has evolved under NCSC and IASME, all CE Certification Bodies (CB) have had to demonstrate the quality and robustness of their own policies, processes and systems.
All CE Assessors have had to requalify to rigorous, new standards and not all have evolved and done so. Now all IASME CBs must hold the equivalent of ISO27001 for Quality Management and ISO 9001 for Information Security Management.
Grant McGregor has achieved these standards (no mean feat) yet not all apparent ”Certification Bodies” or ”Cyber Consultants” have done so and IASME are working to stop this kind of false advertising.
So, when choosing a partner to help you to certify, don’t be afraid to check their credentials and ask to speak with customers who have already been through the process.
We’re ready to help. If you’re ready to start, take a look at the next step …
Book a 15-minute, no-nonsense discovery
call with one of our expert cyber security team.
Cyber Essentials Protects Your Business.
Start now with an informal chat with one of our team...
What our customers say
We were previously using another email security solution which required a fair amount of daily input from IT on the management side of things and wasn’t a service we had a lot of confidence in given how critical the service is to business operation. The new Email Security managed IT service we have from Grant McGregor has proven to be excellent – it’s reduced the IT management time to an absolute minimum and has given us absolute confidence that our email delivery is about as safe as it’s possible to be.
Euan Cowieson
IT Manager
IT Manager
Findlay Irvine
Essential Resources
Find out why Cyber Essentials (CE) is now more essential than ever…
This guide will give you clear info about how the Cyber Essentials scheme can help protect you against the most common but harmful cyber threats, and save your business from the growing volume of attacks.
Our Expert Knowledge
Published Weekly
Why the IT Support Partner You Choose to Work With Could Be Your Biggest Security Risk
Cyber Security - let’s call it what it really means – protecting yourself against Criminals.
Modern cyber crime might be one of the biggest risks your business faces. It could cause you massive disruption, reputational damage or even ultimately to close shop. But how do you know your business is protected as well as it could be – or as well as you need it to be?
26th August 2021
New NCSC Research Shows Small Businesses Have Most to Gain from Cyber Essentials Scheme
Small businesses typically benefit the most from a Cyber Essentials or Cyber Essentials Plus certification, according to new research conducted for the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre.
The NCSC commissioned BritainThinks to perform a baseline review of Cyber Essentials to look at how the scheme has influenced cyber security attitudes and behaviours on UK organisations to date. The results were published on the NCSC website in November 2020.
26th August 2021
The new security threats faced by every UK business
As 2020 gets well underway, the Grant McGregor team is taking the opportunity to ask: what are the security threats we need to be aware of now? Here’s our take on the security issues you should be thinking about in 2020.
Facing off against the ever-changing IT security threat resembles a game of whack-a-mole. As soon as IT specialists and solution providers have fixed one vulnerability, hackers are looking for a new one to exploit.
Book a 15-minute, no-nonsense discovery
call with one of our expert cyber security team.
Make your whole business safer with Cyber Essentials.
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