Cyber Security Bolton

Local, CREST-accredited cyber security for Bolton businesses: penetration testing, Cyber Essentials and certification, and SOC consulting and support.

Bolton’s manufacturing, logistics and service businesses face growing cyber threats and rising demands, from clients, insurers and tenders, to prove their security. Solusec provides the full range of cyber security services, scoped to what your business actually needs.

What we do for Bolton businesses

Testing and assurance

CREST-accredited penetration testing for your networks, web apps, cloud and AI systems, plus vulnerability assessment.

Certification and compliance

As a Cyber Essentials and IASME Cyber Assurance Certification Body we handle Cyber Essentials, Cyber Essentials Plus and IASME Cyber Assurance.

Detection, response and monitoring

SOC consulting and support and incident response to spot and stop attacks.

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We are based in Albrighton and work across the region, remotely and on site where it helps. Tell us what you are dealing with and we will tell you honestly what you need, including if that is less than you expected.

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Industrial estates, and what sits on the works network

Bolton’s employment is concentrated in manufacturing, engineering, distribution and the services around them, and those businesses tend to have something most modern organisations do not: a network with machinery on it.

Production equipment is specified for a working life measured in decades. The computer attached to it is not. The result is a works network carrying controllers and interfaces running software that stopped receiving updates years ago, kept alive because the machine itself is fine and the vendor has moved on or disappeared.

This is manageable and it is not a reason to avoid certification. What it requires is a boundary that genuinely exists. The usual failure is a separation that was configured once, never verified, and quietly undermined by a laptop that gets plugged in every week to pull production data off.

Succession, and the knowledge that left with somebody

A recurring pattern in older industrial businesses is that the person who understood the systems has retired or moved on, and what remains is a set of arrangements nobody can explain. A share that everybody maps without knowing what serves it. A scheduled task that must not be stopped. A remote access tool somebody installed for a supplier in 2018.

Scanning an estate in that condition produces a long report and little useful change. The better first step is an afternoon spent writing down what exists, what depends on it and who supports it. It is unglamorous and it consistently reveals more than tooling does.

What customers are starting to ask

Requirements reach Bolton organisations mainly through customers rather than regulators. A long-standing supply relationship gets a security schedule attached at renewal, or a tender for public sector work specifies a certificate as a condition of bidding.

For most, Cyber Essentials is the answer, and it is worth more than the certificate alone: working through the five controls tends to surface exactly the inventory and boundary questions above. Where a customer has specified the audited level, that is a different undertaking and the wording is worth checking before anybody commits to a date.

How the distance works

We are in Shropshire, which puts Bolton around ninety minutes away. Testing, scoping and the bulk of certification work run remotely, which is appropriate to them rather than a concession to geography. Where attendance is genuinely needed, for an audit across a complicated estate or an incident, we travel and the cost appears as its own line in the quote rather than buried in a rate.

Related

Common questions

Cyber security support in Bolton

Not every organisation in Bolton needs a certificate. Plenty need someone senior to look at what they actually have and say plainly which risks are real. Given manufacturing, engineering and textiles, sitting inside Greater Manchester's wider supply chains, the honest answer is often that the exposure is smaller than feared in one place and larger than expected in another.

What we typically find is mixed sites where office IT is managed reasonably well and production is not managed at all. That is not a failing, it is what happens when a business grows faster than the systems supporting it. The useful work is deciding which of those gaps actually matters given who you are and what you hold, rather than fixing everything at once.

We work as consultants, not as a platform vendor, so we are not trying to move you onto a monthly licence. Bolton work usually runs remotely with a site visit for the production side. Where this turns into ongoing work it is usually fractional CISO support or SOC support over your existing tooling.