Importance of Cyber Essentials and Steps for Certification
Do you think your organization is in need of a protection from cybercriminals? To preserve your official documents and customer details from hackers and criminals, Cyber Essential Certification is important. They are government implemented a scheme that helps you to protect your ventures stored details against online cyber-attacks.
GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation guarantee the privacy of your personal data, but they don't provide any specific measures to do so. This regulation tells that you are responsible for your own personal data and it's your duty to protect them. This part of security can be ensured by Cyber Essentials security schemes when it comes to system and stored data.
Why Cyber Essentials?
Cyber-attacks are the most common criminal activity taking place in recent times. Increase in these crime rates has affected the revenue and reputation of those organizations being attacked. Cyber Essentials were introduced to reduce these crimes and to ensure that all online businesses can be run safely.
These security systems protect those basic Information Technologies and software of the company, which are more easily hacked and used against them. The government collaborated with Information Security Forum (ISF) and the Information Assurance for Small and Medium Enterprises (IASME) consortium and developed some technical methods to create a protection for these basic vulnerabilities of your organization.
Once the customers understand that your organization has successfully certified to this security scheme, they get a confidence to approach you more often. This certification ensures them that you have taken the first step towards securing their privacy as well.
Getting certified with valid certification bodies can keep away hackers who look for unprotected and exposed organization system and software. This certification badge also creates an advantage of attracting more customers who consider your venture a successful, secure and trustworthy.
Certification of security scheme is mandatory when working with government contracts or certain technical products and services. Working with these central government contracts will require handling more sensitive and personal information, thus cyber essential certification is more important so that they can be saved from those cyber threats.
Types of securities
There are different ways to ensure that your system is secured against these threats. Not all the organizations will have time and experts to create a full-on security system for protecting themselves. The main types of securities are:
- The easiest way is to gain your own knowledge of cyber securities and secure your companies ITs and software yourself.
- Cyber essential certification can be adopted if you want to take security to a more reliable level.
- For more advanced cyber security you can opt for cyber essentials plus certification.
Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus
- Cyber Essentials
This scheme gives the organization basic security against common cyber attacks. Securing your system from these easy vulnerabilities are important because, if exposed, they can make you an easy target for those cyber attackers.
Getting this certification is simple and less costly. The important advantage of this type is that you can decide how much the certification company, you chose, should interfere once the security is certified. You can ask for as much help as you need and avoid unwanted interference.
- Cyber Essentials Plus
It is a type of security system with the same simplicity in technical methods and the place where to put them, as the Cyber Essential scheme. The difference is that the verification of security is done by the certification company, you chose, independently.
5 main technical controls provided by the cyber essentials
When we say that these schemes provide security against cyber threats technically, it means that they provide with the main technical controls as given below;
- Boundary firewalls and internet gateways for your system
- Secure your system configuration
- Control the access to your system or software
- Protection from malware
- Patch management
Certification methods
After deciding, mentally, the type of security you want to implement to your system, you can start the step by step process towards certification of the cybersecurity.
There are three steps towards certification:
- Selecting Certification Body through one of the main five Accreditation Bodies.
- Making sure that your IT is secure and meets the standards set by the Cyber Essentials
- Complete the questionnaire provided by the selected Certification Body.
We can know about these processes in more details:
- Selecting Certification Body through the Accreditation Bodies
There are mainly five Accreditation Bodies currently: APMG, CREST, IASME consortium, IRM Security and QG management standards. Research about these bodies and select the best suit for your organization and your security needs. Once selected the Accreditation Body, click on their website link and go through their Certification Bodies list. These are the bodies that will verify your securities and provide you with cyber essentials certificate.
The processes Accreditation Bodies perform are:
- These bodies provide the questionnaire for the certification process.
- Conducts processes for auditing the Certification Bodies in them.
- Checks whether these Certification Bodies meet all the technical competence demanded by NCSC
- These Accreditation Bodies are regularly audited by NCSC
- Making sure that your IT is secure and meets the standards set by the Cyber Essentials.
For the certification process, the Cyber Essentials will need some requirements for your information technology and you will be advised to provide various forms of evidence before the certification process.
All you need to take care of is that your systems and software can meet these requirements and can submit those evidence, the Certification Body you chose demands, before moving on to the next step of certification.
- Complete the questionnaire provided by the selected Certification Body
After providing with all the requirements and evidence demanded by the Certification Body, they will start the installation, configuration and maintenance of your information technology. Now the last step is to answer the questionnaire the Certification Body supply you with and submit them.
Gloss