September 26, 2019
The future of Cyber Essentials
The history
In 2014, the UK introduced the Cyber Essentials scheme to provide guidance on mitigating the most common cyber threats.
The organisational structure for how this is delivered and achieved is as follows:
The UK Government appointed 5 Accreditation Bodies (ABs):
The ABs would develop their own Cyber Essentials questionnaire and marking scheme, train and appoint their own Certification Bodies (CBs), and moderate the certifications.
CBs, such as Astrix, would actually certify the organisations.
On the 14th of August 2018, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) — the current operator and moderator of the scheme — informed all 5 ABs that, among other things, they may be looking to reduce the number of ABs to achieve greater consistency and that these changes would take effect in 2020.
Since then, we’ve all been waiting in anticipation for the NCSC’s decision.
The news
On the 25th of September 2019, Emma Philpott, CEO of The IASME Consortium, informed all CBs that:
The NCSC have informed all other ABs that they have selected IASME to be the sole AB from the 1st of April 2020 (no, this isn’t an April Fools prank!).
This information is now public so we’re free to share it. Naturally, we couldn’t wait!
An official announcement will be coming at the end of this week and a senior person from the NCSC will be publicly speaking about this very topic at the Malvern Festival of Innovation’s cybersecurity day which we will be attending.
Update (2019/10/07 10:21): The NCSC have now officially announced this great news at https://www.cyberessentials.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/iasme-consortium-new-cyber-essentials-partner!
Sign-off
Astrix have been a CB via IASME since 2016 and, since then, we’ve worked quite closely with them to try to streamline and enhance the accessibility, process, and scheme so we’re very excited to continue doing so now that they will have greater influence!
If you’re a normal organisation or a non-IASME CB now needing to re-certify under IASME, we’d love for you to get certified with us!
Feel free to subscribe to our newsletter to be automatically notified of future posts. Until next time! 😊
