What is changing?
From 1st April 2020 the management of the Cyber Essentials scheme is moving to a single partner, IASME. At the same time the cost to you as a customer for the basic level Cyber Essentials certification will be fixed for all certifying bodies at £300 + VAT.
How does this affect your organisation?
There is no change to the Cyber Essentials requirements and existing certificates will still be valid until their recommended reassessment date.
However, 4ARMED has decided not to continue certifying organisations for Cyber Essentials after this date.
To make things easier for our Cyber Essentials clients, we have asked one of our partners, Cyber Strategies, to take over the management of your certifications following the move to IASME.
Cyber Strategies have a great deal of experience in Cyber Essentials along with a similar ethos to 4ARMED and we feel very confident you will receive a great service going forward.
What do I need to do?
You do not need to do anything. As your recommended reassessment date approaches, Cyber Strategies will contact you to explain the next steps and offer renewal using their simple online platform.
If you would like to know more about Cyber Strategies you can find their website at https://www.cyberstrategies.co.uk/.
Why are 4ARMED not continuing as a Certifying Body?
Our focus is helping organisations build and manage more secure, resilient and compliant software applications and these administrative changes provided the opportunity to ensure the services we offer are fully aligned to this.
Cyber Essentials is primarily concerned with securing an organisation’s employee systems, such as laptops, workstations and mobile devices. These are critical in the supply chain for secure software but are not the area which 4ARMED chooses to focus on. The changes would require additional investment of time and money to maintain and we felt this was better spent enhancing our core services.
Questions
If you have any questions relating to this change please do not hesitate to contact us and we’ll be happy to help.
