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Whether you are selling to the NHS, concerned about your product’s security, or simply protecting your company’s data; cyber security is a key pillar of healthtech compliance and a priority for many innovators. One of the best ways to improve your cyber security is to obtain Cyber Essentials certification, and even more importantly, renew it every year!

What is Cyber Essentials?

Cyber Essentials is a UK Government backed scheme that certifies companies big and small, ensuring they meet a minimum requirement for cyber security. This certification is mandatory for contracts with government bodies, such as the NHS. Although there are two levels to Cyber Essentials certificates, Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus, only Cyber Essentials is currently needed for the NHS Digital Technology Assessment Criteria framework (DTAC) compliance framework. Here’s everything you need to know about both certification types!

Cyber Essentials

Cyber Essentials sets out five basic security controls that can protect organisations against 80% of common cyber attacks. To pass the assessment you will need to prove that these are in place within your organisation.

Cyber Essentials Plus

Cyber Essentials Plus builds on Cyber Essentials, requires more preparation and applies a higher level of scrutiny to your corporate security controls. Essentially, it involves external scans being run against specific IT assets you’d reported in your Cyber Essentials application to gather hard evidence that the reported controls are in place.

Both certification types expire after one year and need to be renewed annually. Keep in mind, every year the standards are updated and changed to align to the current global cyber security threat landscape, so your application from the previous year won’t be accepted.

Cyber Essentials protects you on multiple fronts

Beyond contractual obligations and DTAC, there are very real reasons you should prioritise renewing your Cyber Essentials certifications. Cyber attacks are increasingly common and more dangerous than ever. Whenever preventative steps are taken, hackers are again finding new ways around old security measures to exploit your private data and company’s information. By not renewing your Cyber Essentials certification, you run the risk of having out of date cyber protection and will therefore be more vulnerable to data breaches that can result from cyber attacks.

By being Cyber Essentials compliant, you prove that you are prioritising keeping your data safe and secure, and that you have met the baseline standard for cyber defence in your company.  

Be prepared, before you need it. 

Another valuable part of Cyber Essentials is having business continuity plans in place, which can help back you up in the unfortunate case that you are a victim of a cyber attack or data breach. Our work with innovators has proven how crucial it is to create plans and methods before you need them, accelerating your business’s recovery and minimising damage from attacks. Renewal ensures that as your business grows, your continuity plans are kept up to date, realistic, and useful. 

Do you need to complete or renew Cyber Essentials?

Cyber Essentials certification is an important first step for healthtech startups as it is part of the NHS Digital Technology Assessment Criteria framework (DTAC), the minimum baseline standard that must be achieved for an innovation to be able to be piloted with, or procured by the NHS. Here at Acorn Compliance, we’ve completed hundreds of successful Cyber Essentials applications, helping innovators to prove to the NHS that they are taking Cyber Security seriously.

Ready to get started with Cyber Essentials? 

Book a free discovery call with us! We’re here to help guide you through the process, educate your team, and demystify cyber essentials and all other aspects of DTAC.  And please note that Cyber Essentials, inclusive of the assessment fee, is included with all of our DTAC Squirrel™ packages!

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