Cyber Essentials Plus Telford

Cyber Essentials Plus is the same five controls as Cyber Essentials, with an independent technical audit instead of a questionnaire. An assessor tests a sample of your devices, your email and web filtering and your cloud services, to confirm the controls are genuinely in place rather than genuinely described. For a lot of Telford suppliers it is the version the customer actually meant.

Why Telford organisations get asked for Plus

Cyber Essentials is usually enough. Plus gets asked for when the buyer has more at stake, and in Telford that happens for structural reasons rather than random ones.

• Defence. Defence Cyber Certification requires Cyber Essentials at every level and Cyber Essentials Plus at Levels 2 and 3. With a defence manufacturing cluster in the town, suppliers profiled above Level 1 need it.
• Automotive primes. Tier one suppliers audit their own supply chain, and an audited certification answers a question a self-assessment does not.
• Insurers and larger contracts. Some policy wording and some framework terms specify Plus by name. It is worth checking the wording before assuming, because a good number of people are quoted for Plus when Cyber Essentials would have satisfied the clause.

If you are not sure which you have been asked for, send us the clause. We would rather tell you Cyber Essentials covers it than sell you an audit you did not need.

What the audit involves on a manufacturing site

Telford's business base is heavily industrial, with manufacturing and engineering at about 15.5% of local employment, and that shapes how the audit runs:

• Device sampling across both estates. Office laptops are straightforward. The sample has to reach the machines people actually use on the shop floor, and those are the ones more likely to be running something unsupported.
• Mobile and bring your own device. Phones that pick up work email are in scope, which catches organisations out more than any other single item.
• Scheduling around production. The audit needs access to real devices and the people who use them. We book it around your shifts rather than expecting the line to stop.
• Things the questionnaire let you describe. A patching policy on paper and a patch applied within the window are different claims, and the audit checks the second one.

Get the sequence right, or you pay twice

Cyber Essentials is a prerequisite for Plus, and the certificate has to be under three months old when the Plus audit starts. Certify in January, decide in June that a customer needs Plus, and you are paying for Cyber Essentials again before the audit can even begin.

So if Plus is where you are heading, say so at the start and we will plan the two together. We certify Cyber Essentials directly as an appointed IASME Certification Body, which means both halves come from the same people on one timeline.

Local, and no handoff

We are twenty minutes from Telford at Albrighton. There is no travel charge for Telford, Shropshire or the West Midlands, the assessor is the person you speak to, and the certificate is issued by us rather than passed to a third party. If you want to see how Plus sits against the standard certification first, our comparison of the two sets out what the audit adds.

Everything we do in Telford

Seven services, one local practice. Whichever one brought you here, the others are run by the same people from the same place, twenty minutes away at Albrighton.

• Cyber security in Telford the overview of everything we do locally
• Cyber Essentials in Telford certification, assessed and issued by us
• Cyber Essentials Plus in Telford you are here
• IASME Cyber Assurance in Telford for when Cyber Essentials is not enough
• Penetration testing in Telford CREST-accredited testing of what you expose
• Ethical hacker in Telford the person, the credentials and the authorisation
• DCC Level 0 in Telford for suppliers into the defence chain

Common questions