There’s a lot in the media at the moment about cyber security so it’s no wonder that businesses are putting it to the top of their agenda. They are prioritising the need to protect all their devices and cloud services from unauthorised access to the vast amount of personal and business information stored on them.
A recent Nexus customer survey revealed that our clients feel their biggest cyber security challenges of 2022 are obtaining Cyber Essentials (or Cyber Essentials+) and staff awareness around phishing and cyber-crime.
What is Cyber Essentials?
Cyber Essentials is the only UK Government cyber certification. It has been created for SMEs to reduce their chance of suffering from the most common cyber-attacks by up to 80 percent, by being aligned with the five technical controls: malware protection, firewalls, password-based authentication, user access control and secure configuration.
For many organisations, Cyber Essentials is a mandatory requirement in order to do business with some government organisations, but for everyone else, becoming Cyber Essentials certified is simply the peace of mind you need. It allows you to focus on the growth of your business rather than being concerned with its security. It also allows you to reassure your clients that you take cyber security seriously and, having been certified, you can display the badge on all your communication channels for your prospects and clients to see.
Nexus has partnered with Cyber Tec Security to offer a complete package to help protect you against cyber-attacks and help guide you to becoming Cyber Essentials certified. The threat of a cyber-attack is now a routine risk of running a business and Cyber Essentials is a way of protecting your business against the most common risks associated with it.
Nexus can assess your current situation and work on the necessary improvements, to help you pass the assessment first time. As an assessing body, Cyber Tec can hold your hand on the path to becoming certified and can ensure you have a fail-proof application first time.
What is phishing?
Phishing is a cyber-crime whereby an employee (or employees) is contacted by email, telephone or text message by someone posing as a legitimate institution. The purpose of this communication is to lure individuals into providing sensitive data – such as personally identifiable information, banking and credit card details and passwords. If shared, this information can be used to access accounts and can result in identity theft, data breaches and, subsequently, financial loss.
Whilst many people assume they won’t get sucked into a scam, the increasingly intelligent approaches from scammers means that businesses are now identifying the need to educate their staff more to the potential risk.
With so many people now also working from home, there has never been a greater need for heightened security procedures and education of staff to protect sensitive information.
Our own protection against cyber-attacks
At Nexus, we take our own cyber security – and that of our clients – incredibly seriously. This continued commitment to the highest levels of cyber security has been proved by our achievement of the prestigious ISO27001 accreditation and our continued conformance with the standard.
ISO27001 is an internationally recognised standard for information security. It provides the framework for an effective Information Security Management System (ISMS) and is the gold standard for the vital protection of organisation and client data.
As part of this accreditation, we have audited policies, procedures and education in place for remote working to ensure that data and sensitive information is always secure. This is vital, not only for our business, but for all of our managed IT clients.
This accreditation is extremely rare in the IT industry and we’re proud to have achieved it to demonstrate our expertise in this area to our clients.
The future
The challenge you face is that cyber-attack risks are increasing and the methods of attack are consistently getting smarter. Therefore, it’s vital that you have a handle on the security and protection of your business data.
Let us know if you want to talk about obtaining Cyber Essentials or any other cyber security support.
