Why Cyber Essentials and ISO 27001 are essential for your growth

Holly Lane — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 10:00:57 +0000

Cyber Essentials and ISO 27001, what are they and what are the differences?

Cyber Essentials and ISO 27001 are systems developed to help companies protect themselves from the threats that exist in the modern digital world of the internet and electronic data. These take the form of certifications that can be awarded to companies within the UK. Certification is a great way to advertise to customers and suppliers that you operate safely, and some may even require you to have certification in order to tender for work with them.

The UK government has backed Cyber Essentials as their go to security certification, covering your basic bare minimums; this should be the starting point for any SME in the UK.

ISO 27001 certification builds on the fundamentals of information security with a series of controls that can impact your whole business. It’s an internationally recognised certification that is often used as the starting point for larger businesses, government tendering and IT/Software outsourcing for well over a decade.

Cyber Essentials and ISO27001 work in tandem to ensure that sensitive data, be it from a client, a supplier, or your own internal records, is handled with appropriate levels of control and protection. They provide a framework for identifying and mitigating risks, safeguarding against the significant dangers of operating a business in today’s market, and ensuring that should you be attacked you have effective protection to ensure the continuity of your company.

Do you understand the level of security risk you are carrying?

Government statistics for 2024 suggest cyber-attacks grew by around 20% per month. Ransomware attacks grew by 70% over the year; and, where an attack was successful, it cost businesses an average of around £3.5K to sort out. The same statistics show that only 3% of businesses have implemented and adhere to Cyber Essentials, the starting place for protection. Maybe implementing these basic, best practice steps BEFORE your Information is spread across all of space and time, would be an idea worth more than £3.5K, mine certainly is.

Some industries can face wider, and vastly more significant consequences for failing to keep data secure, these consequences aren’t even just fines from the ICO. Businesses like those in the software development industry could face severe reputational damage:

If you, as experts in software can’t protect your own information, why should someone else trust you with theirs?

How do you protect your position in the market and brand/product name as the news filters into the marketplace, as it always does?

What of the financial liabilities? If someone using your software has a data leak, and it’s traced to your products or services, the claim for consequential damages can be significant, and in small businesses can result in liability claims against individual Directors and Shareholders.

Time and Priorities

A good starting point is to identify what data you hold, where you hold it and how its accessed, and that’s not always obvious.

A UK business preparing for a government tender asked me to complete a quick third-party assessment of their information security. This is a good foundational task to complete and, in this case, we found some critical information our customer didn’t know. One of the primary services they use is cloud based, but as it turned out the cloud service provider was using data centres outside of the UK/EU economic area. Data centres operating outside of this area are not obligated to conform with Data protection laws in the UK and some can even be required to share access to your data with the government of their host country. Our customer, completely unaware of this would have struggled to win anything to do with UK government work whilst using this overseas hosted service. Sometimes its worthwhile reading the small print and completing detailed due diligence!

In a smaller business everything comes down to time and priorities. Do you have the time and resources internally to complete such an assessment yourselves? within a reasonable timescale too?
Or, will it continue to be put off as your resources are focussed on your customers and bringing in revenue?

If so, we may be able to help you. Our experienced staff can work with you to take the necessary steps quickly and efficiently, whilst leaving your staff to keep delivering projects with minimal interference, so they can keep earning the vital funds that keep you afloat.

Questions? We're here to help.

Contact us now to gain a no commitment explanation of the costs and timescales for attaining Cyber Essentials or ISO 27001 certification.

Cyber Security and Information/Data Control are almost certainly the biggest threats to your business currently, in terms of direct financial loss, loss of reputation, status and significant liability claims.

The cost of implementing the controls recommended by security experts across the globe can vary drastically; especially if you don’t have the time to understand what you’re implementing.
We’re here to help you control these costs and implement effective controls.

Getting independently certified is a great way to make sure these controls are effective but this can also cost you; especially if they aren’t a reputable accredited body. But we can liaise with bodies to get you the most competitive rates.

Ultimately, at the end of the day, failure to implement proper information security could destroy your reputation, collapse your business, severely damage the future of you and your employees and could result in significant fines and lawsuits.

Are the risks of rolling that dice everyday really worth it? Get some piece of mind with a quick quote from us, we reckon its worth a look at least.

Conclusion

2024 saw a huge growth in businesses being attacked. This is certain to continue into 2025. It’s getting easier and easier to attack businesses and leaps forward in AI could open the floodgates. Start the year with your eyes looking forwards and let us help.

We have over 50 years’ experience of working with ISO systems covering Information Security, Quality and many others. We can deliver effective and compliant systems built for your business needs, quickly and efficiently so give us a try.

No AI was used to write this post, so the spelling and grammatical errors are all mine, and the result of a UK, state provided, education 😊, for which I remain, most thankful.