Cyber Essentials Plus Birmingham

Book your Cyber Essentials Plus audit in Birmingham

Tell us about your estate and we will confirm a date and a fixed price. You need a Cyber Essentials certificate less than three months old to certify to Plus, and we issue those too. The audit is hands on: external and internal scans, every internet gateway, and a sample of around ten per cent of user devices checked for patching inside fourteen days, malware protection, enforced MFA and user access. Anything it finds, you get 30 days to fix and be retested. No travel charge in Birmingham.

Why Birmingham organisations get asked for Plus

In Birmingham the request usually comes from a client rather than a prime. Law firms, accountancy practices, financial services and the fintech cluster all hold data somebody else is accountable for, and the questionnaire that lands asks for independent verification rather than a declaration. Cyber Essentials Plus is the proportionate way to give it to them.

Cyber Essentials is a verified self-assessment: you answer, an assessor marks it. Plus adds an independent technical audit on top, where somebody tests the machines rather than reading about them. When a buyer says the self-assessment is not enough, Plus is almost always what they mean.

What the audit meets in Birmingham

A Birmingham professional firm is usually cloud-first with a small physical footprint, which makes the audit about settings rather than servers. The three that decide it: whether multi-factor authentication is enforced rather than merely switched on, whether the sampled laptops are genuinely patched inside fourteen days, and whether a standard user account can do things only an administrator should. Remote testing covers most of this without anybody losing a day.

What usually costs a pass in Birmingham

Multi-factor authentication switched on but not enforced, which the audit treats as not present
Laptops that spend most of their life off the corporate network and behind on patches
An administrator account used for day-to-day work because it is quicker

None of these is unusual and none of them is a reason to delay. They are the things worth checking before you commit to a date, which is what a pre-audit review is for.

Sequencing

You need a valid Cyber Essentials certificate, less than three months old when the Plus certificate is issued, and 30 days to remediate anything the audit finds. We certify both, so an expired certificate is something we fix rather than something that sends you elsewhere. The main Cyber Essentials Plus page has the detail.

Local, and no handoff

Birmingham is about half an hour from us at Albrighton, so an on-site day is easy where the estate needs one. No travel charge anywhere in the West Midlands. The Lead Assessor who runs the audit is the person you speak to, and as an appointed Cyber Essentials Plus Certification Body we issue the certificate ourselves rather than passing it to a third party.

Common questions

Do you cover Birmingham?

Yes. Birmingham is about half an hour from us at Albrighton, so an on-site day is easy where the estate needs one. We are an appointed Cyber Essentials Plus Certification Body, so the audit and the certificate both come from us.

Do I need Cyber Essentials first?

Yes, and it has to be less than three months old when the Plus certificate is issued. If yours has aged out or you do not hold it yet, we can certify that directly first.

What does the audit actually test?

An external vulnerability scan of your internet-facing addresses, an internal authenticated scan across a representative sample of user devices, and testing of every internet gateway and any server reachable by an unauthenticated user. On the sampled devices we check malware protection, patching inside fourteen days, enforced multi-factor authentication on cloud services, and that standard users cannot do administrator-only things.

What happens if we fail something?

You get 30 days to fix it and be retested. Most things found at audit are configuration rather than cost, and we tell you exactly what and why rather than handing you a score.

Can this be done without anyone coming to our office?

Usually yes. A Birmingham professional firm with a cloud estate is normally tested entirely remotely. Where something genuinely needs hands on it, we are half an hour away.

Can the audit be done remotely?

Often, yes. Remote testing covers most estates. Where the estate genuinely needs somebody on site, we do that too, and there is no travel charge in our coverage area.