Cyber Security Manchester

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

Manchester’s professional-services, digital, financial and creative 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 Manchester 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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A city where most of the risk is in somebody else’s cloud

Manchester’s growth sectors are digital, media and professional services, and organisations in all three tend to own very little infrastructure. There is no server room. There is a cloud tenancy, a long list of software subscriptions and a laptop fleet.

That is a good position to be in, but it moves the risk rather than removing it. The questions worth asking change accordingly:

• How many applications hold your data? Most organisations underestimate this by a factor of two or three, because tools get adopted by teams rather than procured centrally.
• Which of them authenticate through your main identity provider, and which have their own separate usernames and passwords nobody is tracking.
• What happens when somebody leaves? Removing the main account does nothing about the eleven services they signed up for directly.
• Who holds administrative rights in each tenancy, which is frequently a founder who stopped doing the job two years ago.

An identity and application review answers more for this kind of organisation than a network test would, because there is barely a network to test.

Software businesses and the test that actually matters

For a software business the product is the attack surface, and a generic infrastructure scan tells you almost nothing about it. The useful work is application testing against the authenticated areas: whether one customer can reach another customer’s data, whether a user can escalate their own permissions, whether the API enforces the same rules the interface does.

That last one catches more organisations than anything else. Controls implemented in the front end and assumed in the back end are the single most common serious finding in a modern application, and they are invisible to anything that only looks at the perimeter.

Where you are selling to enterprise customers, a test report is increasingly part of the sales process rather than a compliance afterthought, and a report that reads as though somebody understood your product is worth considerably more in that conversation than one that lists ports.

Media, agencies and client assets

Agencies and production businesses hold other people’s material: campaign assets before launch, footage under embargo, customer lists provided for a project. The contractual obligations around that are frequently stricter than anything the agency applies to its own data, and clients have started auditing it.

The recurring weak points are large file transfer services used outside any policy, freelancers with standing access long after a project closed, and shared accounts for tools that only support one login. None of the three is difficult to fix, and all three come up in client audits.

Working with Manchester organisations from the Midlands

We are based at Albrighton in Shropshire, roughly ninety minutes from Manchester. For this kind of work that matters less than it sounds, because application testing, cloud reviews and certification are genuinely remote activities and attending in person would add cost without adding quality.

Where on-site attendance is warranted, for a Cyber Essentials Plus audit or an incident, we come up and quote the travel transparently as a separate line rather than burying it in a day rate.

Related

Common questions

Cyber security support in Manchester

Not every organisation in 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, alongside substantial manufacturing and logistics, 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 with small physical footprints, which should be fast, except that developer and designer machines are routinely excluded from the managed estate. 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. Manchester engagements usually run remotely, with an on-site day only where the estate needs it. Where this turns into ongoing work it is usually fractional CISO support or SOC support over your existing tooling.