Get certified

- because cyber security isn't optional, it's essential.

National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC)

What is Cyber Essentials?

Cyber Essentials is the minimum standard of cyber security recommended by the UK Government, developed by experts at the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) to protect organisations of all sizes. The scheme focuses on five core technical controls designed to prevent the most common online threats, many of which are opportunistic attacks looking for easy weaknesses. [ncsc.gov.uk]

As cyber criminals continue to evolve, the Cyber Essentials framework evolves with them, ensuring your protection stays relevant and robust.

At Essentia, we see it as a smart, accessible first step towards real cyber confidence. It’s about putting the basics in place brilliantly, so your organisation can operate with clarity, certainty, and peace of mind.

The Core Controls

Boundary Firewalls and Internet Gateways
Ensuring ingress and egress filtering is properly configured, aligned to least‑privilege principles and monitored for drift.
Secure Configuration
Hardening endpoints, servers, cloud workloads, and network components to eliminate default vulnerabilities and apply consistent baseline standards.
Access Control
Enforcing strong identity and access policies across on‑prem and cloud systems, including MFA adoption, privileged access restrictions, and credential hygiene.
Malware Protection
Deploying modern endpoint protection, real‑time scanning, and behavioural detection to prevent common and opportunistic threats.
Patch Management
Ensuring timely application of security updates, system‑level patch scheduling, and configuration integrity across all assets within scope.

Essentia’s Technical Approach

We combine hands‑on technical assessment with clear engineering guidance.

Our team helps you:

Map every asset, service, and identity into a defensible scope
Remediate gaps with practical, scalable fixes
Implement secure-by-default configurations
Validate controls through real‑world testing
Prepare technical evidence ahead of assessment

The result is a defensible, standards‑aligned security posture that not only achieves certification but strengthens the integrity of your environment.

Use the free Cyber Essentials Readiness Tool provided by IASME on behalf of the NCSC. This tool can help you gauge your current level of cyber security.

CE READINESS TOOL

Cyber Essentials, the Essentia Way

Cyber Essentials isn’t just a box to tick, it’s the foundation of a resilient, modern business. At Essentia, we see it as a smart, accessible first step towards real cyber confidence. It’s about putting the basics in place brilliantly, so your organisation can operate with clarity, certainty, and peace of mind.

Cyber Essentials protects you from the most common cyber‑attacks by focusing on simple, proven security controls. No drama. Just practical, effective measures that strengthen your digital environment from day one.

And that’s where we come in.

Essentia helps you cut through the noise. We guide you through the process with clear advice, hands‑on support, and a deep understanding of how your organisation actually works. We turn a traditionally technical exercise into something approachable, manageable, and genuinely valuable.

Cyber Essentials becomes becomes the start of a stronger, safer future for your business.

Map every asset into a defensible scope, every inclusion and exclusion with technical justification and details of segregation.

- Assess all endpoints (Windows, macOS, Linux), mobile devices, servers, IoT devices, virtual/cloud services, and unmanaged assets.
- Capturing hardware identifiers, OS versions, installed software, patch states, and exposure points.
- Mapping network segments, VLANs, VPN entry points, and remote connectivity paths.
- Review legacy on‑prem systems and/or hybrid cloud environments.

Identify gaps and assess service, and identity access adjustments into a defensible scope.

- Define all cloud services accessed with corporate credentials (including SaaS, IaaS, PaaS).
- Reviewing identity providers (Azure AD, Entra ID, Okta, Google Workspace) for login paths and conditional access enforcement.
- Detecting shadow IT and unapproved services that may create MFA or scoping risks.
- Analysing user provisioning, authentication flows, role-based access controls, and administrative privilege assignments.
- Ensuring alignment between identity boundaries, device membership, and MFA enforcement points.

Translate our findings into practical, scalable, and actionable engineering work.

- Assess all endpoints (Windows, macOS, Linux), mobile devices, servers, IoT devices, virtual/cloud services, and unmanaged assets.
- Enforcing MFA across all cloud and remote‑access services.
- Aligning password policies with modern standards, including secure storage.
- Enforcing controlled admin boundaries (local admin removal, privileged access workstations etc).

All remediation work is designed to scale, be automated where possible, standardised across platforms, and fully documented for continued compliance.

- Deploying uniform endpoint protection policies (EDR/MDR/XDR/SOC).
- Enforcing secure configuration on cloud services (logging, audit trails, least privilege, conditional access, secure endpoints).
- Closing firewall gaps, tightening inbound/outbound rules, and isolating legacy systems.
- Correcting group memberships and eliminating dormant accounts.
- Hardening operating systems using baseline templates, and removing legacy protocols.

We implement secure‑by‑default patterns across your environment.

- Assess Applying configuration baselines via Intune, GPO, MDM, or configuration management tools.
- Enforcing application controls, disk encryption, OS hardening, and secure update mechanisms.
- Configuring identity‑driven controls such as conditional access, MFA enforcement, and device compliance policies.
- Validating cloud service authentication paths to ensure MFA is always the enforced method.

Everything is built to survive real‑world usage and minimise operational overhead.

- Implementing strict ingress/egress filtering with monitored firewall policies.
- Ensuring DNS filtering, secure web gateways, and traffic inspection standards are consistently applied.
- Combine discovery, prioritisation, remediation, and continuous verification, ensuring environment stays patched, and defensible.
- Standardising certificate lifecycle management, ensuring automatic renewal, revocation checking, and correct trust‑store configuration across all systems.
- Implementing secure log retention policies, alerting thresholds, and telemetry baselines to detect anomalous behaviour and configuration drift.

Before completing each assessment, we simulate the checks and prepare the technical artefacts needed.

- We ensure everything is clear, consistent, and mapped to required expectations.
- Testing malware protection, verifying patch levels across OS, firmware, and critical applications.
- Verifying that out‑of‑scope systems truly cannot interact with in‑scope assets.
- Confirming legacy authentication is disabled, ensuring external access to administrative portals is properly locked down.

By handling this process on your behalf we are removing ambiguity and making the assessment run smoothly.

- Implementing strict ingress/egress filtering with monitored firewall policies.
- Screenshots of configurations (MFA settings, endpoint protection states, firewall rules).
- Exported device and user inventories.
- Hardening, patching, and identity controls that hold up under audit.
- A repeatable security baseline you can build on year after year.
- A Stronger, Verifiable Security Posture.

Essentia builds a repeatable, evidence‑driven rhythm that gets you certified, keeps you compliant, and prepares you for CE+ and future renewals.

- Certification is the starting line, not the finish. We embed the control set into day‑to‑day operations.
- Remote management and monitoring with alerting, ticket generation, and remediation as part of your continued support.
- Technology Business Review (TBR) that keep you regularly up to date about changes to certification scope and future remedation needs.
- Recertification steps taken in advance of certification expiry to ensure no delays in the process.

CE+ takes everything required in CE and adds an independent, hands‑on technical audit.

- Assessors test the actual behaviour of your environment rather than relying on your declarations.
- The focus is on proof, not interpretation — reducing ambiguity and strengthening real‑world resiliences.
- CE+ is where cyber maturity is genuinely demonstrated.

Cyber Essentials defines the what.
Cyber Essentials Plus proves the how.