The Cyber Resilience Pledge and Greater Manchester Businesses

The Pledge, and what it means in Greater Manchester

Greater Manchester’s diverse economy supplies enterprises and public bodies that are now committing to require Cyber Essentials across their supply chains. The Cyber Resilience Pledge, launched by the government in July 2026, asks the organisations that sign it to require Cyber Essentials across their supply chains — to audit which suppliers already hold it, and to require it, risk-based, from those who don’t. For Greater Manchester businesses supplying those signatories, that turns Cyber Essentials into a practical condition of keeping the work.

Why this matters — not just for government suppliers

It’s easy to read ‘government pledge’ and assume it’s someone else’s problem. It isn’t. The third commitment asks signatories to require Cyber Essentials across their supply chains — and the signatories are major private-sector companies, not just departments. As each one audits its suppliers and rolls the requirement out, Cyber Essentials becomes a condition of staying in the chain for Greater Manchester businesses, whether or not you ever bid for a public contract.

This is the same direction of travel as the public-sector procurement rules (PPN 014) and the reason clients are already asking for Cyber Essentials. The Pledge accelerates it. The businesses that get ahead of it keep the work; the ones that wait get the awkward email asking for a certificate they don’t have.

Our position: we’re certified, and we certify

We don’t just help others meet this bar — we hold it ourselves. Solusec is a Cyber Essentials and IASME Cyber Assurance Certification Body, with certified assessors for both schemes. We practise what we preach, which means we know the assessment from both sides: what actually needs to change, and how to get you through it quickly rather than leaving you to wrestle a questionnaire alone.

So whichever side of the Pledge you’re on, we can help. If you supply an organisation that has signed — or is quietly adopting the same supply-chain approach — we get you Cyber Essentials certified, often in days. If you’re the larger organisation making the commitment, we can help you audit Cyber Essentials coverage across your suppliers and take the risk-based approach the Pledge asks for.

Local, and quick

We’re based nearby in Albrighton and work with Greater Manchester businesses onsite and remotely. You deal directly with your Certification Body, and if your controls are in reasonable shape we’ll certify you in days rather than weeks, ahead of the request rather than scrambling after it.

The Cyber Resilience Pledge in Greater Manchester

Greater Manchester has the largest concentration of digital, software and professional services outside London, alongside a substantial manufacturing and logistics base. That mix produces a particular pattern: highly technical organisations that fail on basic device management, because the culture that makes good engineers, autonomy over your own machine and freedom to adopt tools quickly, works directly against centralised control and enforced MFA.

The pledge is a commitment rather than a certification, and that is the point of it: it is a way for an organisation to say publicly that it takes basic cyber hygiene seriously before it is ready to certify. For most businesses it works best as the first step of a plan that ends in Cyber Essentials rather than as a substitute for it.

What we see most often in Greater Manchester

• Developer and designer machines deliberately kept outside the managed estate
• Cloud tools adopted by individual teams without central identity or MFA
• Fast-growing organisations whose IT was set up for fifteen people and now serves ninety

None of these is unusual and none of them is a reason to put the work off. They are simply the things worth checking before you commit to a date. If you want more detail, see what Cyber Essentials actually requires.

Talk to us about your organisation

Tell us what you are dealing with and we will tell you honestly what you need. We work with organisations in your sector regularly, so the conversation starts from what is normal for you rather than from a generic checklist.

Full name *

Email *

Organisation *

Phone (optional)

What do you need? *

Send enquiry →

Your details are handled by a real person, never fed into AI.

Common questions