Cyber Security

It is a government-backed certification covering the fundamentals that stop a wide range of the most common attacks: configuring hardware and software as safely as possible, restricting who can reach your data and services, anti-virus and malware protection, and keeping devices and applications updated. There are two levels. The self-assessment route gives you protection against a wide variety of the most common attacks; Cyber Essentials Plus requires exactly the same protections but adds a hands-on technical verification. You need it if you bid for government contracts involving certain sensitive or personal information. Beyond procurement, the argument is that the vast majority of attacks are basic and carried out by relatively unskilled people — the online equivalent of walking down a street trying car doors. Being visibly unlocked is what marks you out for more in-depth attention from people who are more capable. We start with a gap assessment against the requirements and a plan built around your organisation.

ISP-level protection tends to be broad rather than granular, and may only cover certain categories of traffic. Bandwidth is not the safety net people assume either — the volume of data in a DDoS attack can overwhelm even the largest service provider, and plenty of attacks work without needing much volume at all. Size is no defence: attacks are now cheap and easy to buy, so small organisations are targeted routinely, sometimes only as a stepping stone to reach the intended victim. And most DDoS attacks go undetected, leaving the cause of the outage unidentified and you with no reading on how vulnerable you still are. DDoS Shield comes in tiers, needs no in-house expertise and no extra hardware, scales as your online presence grows, and gives you traffic information and reports on mitigated attacks instantly or on a regular basis.

It changes behaviour when the feedback lands at the moment of the click rather than in a quarterly slide deck. Every simulated email is turned into a piece of training on the social engineering signal the person missed. Assessments measure users' security knowledge so you have a baseline to work from, template selection adapts to each person's training and phishing history, and reporting rolls up at user, group and organisational level so you can see where the risk actually sits. The phish alert button matters as much as the simulations: it gives staff a safe way to forward an email threat to your team for analysis and removal, which turns them from the weak point into a reporting channel. Training is available in over 35 languages, and the reporting doubles as evidence towards Cyber Essentials, ISO 27001 and cyber insurance requirements.

By being specific rather than blanket. Information is classified by business rule, sharing is governed by user permissions, and endpoints and data streams are monitored to identify risky movement — including optical character recognition, so text sitting inside an image or screenshot is not a blind spot. Access rules can tell a secure managed laptop from an unmanaged personal device, permitting full access on one and restricting sensitive attachments on the other, rather than banning either outright. The same policies can be written to meet regulatory requirements in more than one country. Insider threat prevention sits alongside this, scoring behaviour so risky patterns surface before they turn into fraud, cyber sabotage or a straightforward accident.

Security monitoring runs around the clock, so a potential threat is identified and addressed promptly rather than sitting unnoticed until Monday morning. Suspicious content can be opened in a sandbox, well away from your network, while it is investigated further. If there is an actual breach, incident response is about minimising the damage and getting you back to normal operation quickly. It also matters who you ring: every SCG Solutions client has a named local director rather than a call queue, with 24/7 UK-based support behind them.

With an audit, because assessing your infrastructure, policies and processes tells you which gaps actually matter before you spend anything on tooling. In practice the first three findings are nearly always the same: accounts without multi-factor authentication, former employees whose access still works, and backups nobody has ever restored from. All three are cheap to fix and none needs new hardware.

Yes. Employee awareness training sits alongside firewalls and endpoint protection, because most breaches start with a person rather than a device. What makes it work is being specific to your business — a session about the kinds of message your staff genuinely receive is worth considerably more than a generic course, and short refreshers beat one long session everybody forgets.