Cyber Security Greater Manchester

CREST-accredited cyber security across Greater Manchester: penetration testing, Cyber Essentials and certification, and SOC consulting and support.

From sole traders to multi-site employers, Greater Manchester organisations face growing cyber threats and rising demands, from clients, insurers and tenders, to prove they take security seriously. Solusec provides the full range of cyber security services across the region.

What we do for Greater Manchester businesses

Testing and assurance

CREST-accredited penetration testing for 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.

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Talk to us

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

Ten boroughs, two quite different economies

Greater Manchester is frequently discussed as though it were the city centre with suburbs attached. In security terms it behaves as two economies that happen to share a transport network.

The central districts run on cloud services, subscriptions and laptops, with digital, media and professional organisations that own almost no infrastructure. The outer boroughs, from Bolton and Rochdale round to Stockport and Wigan, hold a great deal of manufacturing, engineering, distribution and long-established family businesses with real estates, real servers and sometimes real machinery attached to the network.

Advice written for one is close to useless for the other. A cloud identity review is the right first step for a Northern Quarter agency and almost beside the point for a Rochdale engineering business with a server cupboard and a works network.

What the outer boroughs usually need first

For the manufacturing and distribution side of the conurbation, the same three things come up repeatedly and none of them requires a purchase.

1. An inventory. Not an asset register for its own sake, but an honest list of what exists, what it does, and who supports it. Most organisations discover something load bearing that nobody had thought about for years.
2. A real boundary around anything unsupported. Old machine controllers are normal and workable, provided the segregation around them exists in the network rather than only in the description.
3. A backup somebody has restored from. Reported success is not evidence. A restore test is an afternoon and it is the difference between an incident and a closure.

Procurement pressure across the conurbation

The combined authority, the councils, the universities and the hospital trusts between them buy from thousands of local organisations, and the assurance expected of a supplier has risen steadily. For most suppliers that means Cyber Essentials, with the audited level appearing where the contract involves access to systems or personal data at scale.

If a requirement has landed and you are not sure which level it means, the wording usually settles it in a couple of minutes. It is worth doing that before committing, because the two differ considerably in both cost and lead time.

How we cover the area

We are based in Shropshire, which puts Greater Manchester around ninety minutes away. Most work is remote, which is appropriate rather than a compromise for testing, cloud reviews and the majority of certification. Where attendance is needed we travel and quote it as a separate line.

There are separate pages for Manchester, Bolton and Stockport.

Cyber security by town in Greater Manchester

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 fractional CISO support.

Common questions

Cyber security support in Greater Manchester

Not every organisation in Greater Manchester needs a certificate. Plenty need someone senior to look at what they actually have and say plainly which risks are real. Given the largest digital, software and professional services concentration outside London, with a substantial manufacturing and logistics base alongside it, 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 cloud-first organisations with small physical footprints, where developer and designer machines are routinely excluded from the managed estate because the controls get in the way. 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. Greater Manchester engagements usually run remotely, with an on-site day only where the estate genuinely needs one. Where this turns into ongoing work it is usually fractional CISO support or SOC support over your existing tooling.