Cyber Essentials Plus Greater Manchester

Book your Cyber Essentials Plus audit in Greater Manchester

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 Greater Manchester.

Why Greater Manchester organisations get asked for Plus

Greater Manchester has the largest digital and technology concentration outside London, and for a fast-growing company here the trigger is rarely a tender. It is the first enterprise customer whose procurement team will not accept a self-assessment, or a funding round where diligence asks who independently verified the controls. Plus is the answer because somebody other than you signed it off.

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 Greater Manchester

The pattern we see is an estate designed for fifteen people now serving ninety. Developer and designer machines deliberately kept outside central management because the controls get in the way. Cloud tools adopted team by team with no shared identity. That matters more for Plus than for the self-assessment, because the audit samples real devices: a machine nobody manages is a machine nobody has patched.

What usually costs a pass in Greater Manchester

Developer machines deliberately outside central management, and genuinely in scope
Cloud tools adopted team by team, with no shared identity and patchy multi-factor authentication
An estate built for fifteen people now serving ninety, where nobody owns patching any more

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

Most Greater Manchester audits run remotely, which is how organisations here tend to prefer it. Where an on-site day is needed we are straight up the M6 from Albrighton, so Manchester, Salford, Stockport and Bolton are a straightforward booking. 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 Greater Manchester?

Yes. Most Greater Manchester audits run remotely, which is how organisations here tend to prefer it. 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.

Will the audit hold up in investor diligence?

It is independent third-party verification against a government-backed scheme, which is what diligence is usually looking for. It is not a substitute for ISO 27001 where an acquirer has specifically mandated ISO.

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.