Cyber Essentials Charity Month 2024

What is Cyber Essentials?

Cyber Essentials is the leading security certification within the United Kingdom. This certification confirms that your IT infrastructure meets the baseline level of security that is expected of a business and is often a core requirement when obtaining government or related contracts due to its reputation and ideals.

As can be seen within the previous blog post, Importance of the Cyber Essentials Scheme, it has numerous benefits to the average company.

How can Cyber Essentials help charities?

But what about charities? What can Cyber Essentials do for you? While the scheme has numerous benefits, one key benefit of the Cyber Essentials Scheme, is that the company can obtain free cyber liability insurance for the whole organisation (subject to conditions). When combined with a Cyber Essentials Plus assessment, this gives an organisation both a useful insurance policy and a great understanding of their security posture.

This insurance can be utilised by an organisation if they unfortunately do become the target of attackers. However, the addition of this insurance to the assessment is free if successful and allows organisations that may not have funds readily available to effectively manage the cost of separate cyber insurance. It has also been shown that those organisation achieving Cyber Essentials are “80% less likely” to suffer any kind of cyber breach.

Certification under the Cyber Essentials scheme can be required to work on some government-based contracts or with organisations that may contract with the UK Government, making it a critical certification to achieve for charitable organisations that will more than likely need to work with the UK Government at some point.

As the Law Centres Network (LCN) found with their experience with Cyber Essentials, which they discussed with NCSC:

“A Law Centre had already been asked for Cyber Essentials certification when making a funding application and dealing with a debt service.”

“If a business or charity wants to win a government contract, Cyber Essentials is mandated as a prerequisite, and we are seeing this become more commonplace elsewhere. Perhaps it will soon be the norm that a cyber security certification is a requirement to work with local authorities.”

What is the discount?

During Charity Awareness Month this year, IASME and participating partners are offering a reduction of £75 to all qualified participants. If assessed through Cyberis, qualified participants will also receive a discount towards Cyber Essentials Plus assessments. This will allow an organisation to gain further insight into their security posture and assess if they are correctly following IASME's pillars of security.

Please see the below illustration to get a clearer idea of how much the standard Cyber Essentials certification may cost to your organisation.

Charity Cyber Essentials Awareness Month pricing structure. £245 for micro organisations, £365 for small organisations, £425 for medium organisations and £525 for large organisations.

How do I get the discount?

The requirements to get the discount are as follows:

The charity must submit their registered charity number which must be validated against the respective UK Charity Commission Register. The discount price will not be available to organisations not listed on the Commission Register.
The application must be made during the month of October 2024. Cut-off will be 5pm on 31st October 2024.
The charity must start the process within one month of application and must have completed and submitted the assessment by 30th April 2025.

If you are unsure that your organisation qualifies for a discount or you would like to enquire about an assessment, then we are here to help. Our Pre-Sales and Cyber Essentials Consultants can help to further explain the requirements, how the initiative works when applying for Cyber Essentials and help you with every step of the assessment, including eligibility for the discount. You can find details below to find out the best way of getting into contact with our team at Cyberis.

Next steps:

If you are a registered charity and you believe you would qualify for this offer, please read over the following Cyber Essentials information, or get in contact with us. If you have already achieved standard Cyber Essentials and have been considering the Cyber Essentials Plus assessment, then we can provide information relating to the cost of an assessment with us, including our discounted rate for charities and how we can help deliver to you the best experience possible.