As of today, Astrix are officially offering cybersecurity assessments as a service!

Background

We decided to do this for mainly two reasons:

We are a Certification Body (CB) for Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus so we know the scheme inside out — it can be great for publicly-attesting that an organisation has implemented the basic best practices and it definitely has value in that. However, due to the nature of its intent and design, there are a number of areas that it falls short on and we felt that we could take it a step further and offer something even more comprehensive and substantial.
MSPs and other types of organisations kept approaching us saying that they’re onboarding a new client or they’re taking over management of an organisation and need an independent assessment of the systems’ cybersecurity so that they know what they’re dealing with.

In the months after deciding to offer this service, we carefully chose and, by way of testing with trusted partners, honed our methodology, tools, service providers, documents, and processes. Naturally, cybersecurity never stands still so we will continue to adapt these as the latest threats and best practices emerge.

Case study

Back in April 2019, Rhys Jenkins transitioned from the IT Helpdesk Manager of an international high street retailer to the Head of Information Technology for the multi-award-winning Cadwyn Housing Association. Shortly after, he contacted us requesting that we (1) perform a cybersecurity assessment on their systems so that he could know exactly what he’s inherited and so that he could present his plan to the senior management and board backed up by an independent report and (2) consult on the implementation of any solutions.

After performing as much remote fact-finding and analysis as possible, we attended on-site with Rhys to investigate internally, discuss some of our findings, and discuss some of the concerns and problems that he’d discovered.

Once we had a complete picture, we spent as much time as required to write a comprehensive-yet-focused report that, among other things, gives a prioritised summary of the biggest problems and their stance on the most effective cybersecurity mitigations in general.

Cadwyn are now in the process of implementing our recommendations and have already purchased 3 new services as a result of our report. They are also planning to get Cyber Essentials Plus-certified with us.

Rhys was kind enough to provide us with a testimonial which can be seen on our testimonials page.