Resources
The Best Free Cyber Security Resources for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses in the Midlands
If you are a small or medium-sized business, it may feel quite overwhelming getting to grips with the world of cyber security threats and ways to protect your business. But fear not, we’ve assembled a list of some fantastic free resources for you so you can keep your business safe on a budget.
Improve Knowledge with NCSC Online Training
Best for: Businesses up to 50 employees without dedicated cyber security training.
The NCSC (National Cyber Security Centre) is a member of GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters). The organisation provides advice and support for the UK’s public and private sector on how to avoid cyber security threats.
One of the most useful resources the NCSC provides for small businesses is ‘Top tips for staff’, a four-part online-training module that covers phishing, passwords, device security, and reporting incidents.
To further help with education around cyber security and online threats, the NCSC also provides ‘Exercise in a Box’. This resource provides exercises, based around the main cyber threats, which your organisation can do in its own time, in a safe environment, as many times as necessary. It includes everything needed to set up, plan, deliver, and identify post-exercise actions.
They have a number of exercises to choose from that cover a variety of topics including: ransomware, phishing, risk management, vulnerabilities, and more.
Exercise in a Box | National Cyber Security Centre →
Check Your Domain Security with Outlaw’s Instant Scan
Best for: Businesses up to 50 employees without dedicated IT teams.
Want a quick check to see what hackers know about your business domain? You can use the Outlaw Domain Security Scan to get an instant response that performs eight distinct checks against publicly available records.
Free Domain Security Scan | Outlaw IT Consultants →
Take Simple Steps to Improve Your Organisation’s Cyber Security with Cyber Action Toolkit
Best for: Businesses up to 10 employees looking to improve their cyber security.
The Cyber Action Toolkit gives you clear, bite-sized actions to protect your business from cyber criminals. It’s designed with small businesses in mind, meaning you don’t need any cyber security knowledge to get started.
It’s a simple, guided process that you can complete at your own pace to build layers of cyber security protection around your business.
Prove Your Security Commitment with a Cyber Essentials Certification
Best for: Businesses of any size with cyber security requirements more rigid than offered in the Cyber Action Toolkit.
Having certain security protections in place is one thing; being able to prove it is another. Businesses of a certain size, or ones working with regulated industries, often need to provide evidence they meet certain security criteria. Cyber Essentials is one such scheme. It builds on the core of the Cyber Action Toolkit and expands this scope to several core pillars required to build a secure IT environment.
Learn more about what exactly Cyber Essentials covers.
And that brings us onto our next point…
Check Where You Stand with Outlaw’s Microsoft 365 Security Assessment
Best for: Microsoft 365-based businesses up to 50 employees who want to verify the security configuration of their IT environment against industry-standard criteria.
If you’re ready to consider a Cyber Essentials certification or simply want to know where you stand, we offer a comprehensive Microsoft 365 maturity assessment that will drill down into policies and settings configured within your environment and provide you with a plain-English professional report that breaks down these configurations into simple, actionable information.
This covers things such as your licence allocation, multi-factor authentication coverage, mail filter policies, device policies, anti-virus configuration, application-level restrictions and much more.
Free Microsoft 365 Assessment Nottingham | Outlaw IT Consultants →
Government-Funded Cyber Security Awareness Training for Your Entire Business
Best for: Businesses up to 50 employees with poor cyber security awareness.
This one is the pick of the bunch. The National Cyber Resilience Centre Group is a national government-funded, non-profit organisation that helps strengthen cyber resilience across England’s small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) community, in support of the government’s National Cyber Strategy.
As part of this scheme, the regional Cyber Resilience Centres (CRC) offer fully-funded security awareness training to local organisations. This is a great resource for small and medium businesses to strengthen employee knowledge of phishing techniques, effective password usage, and cyber security threats.
The training is delivered as a two-and-a-half-hour virtual session, but the CRC will also come out and provide this in person for organisations of a certain size.
If you’re a Nottinghamshire or East Midlands-based company, you can apply for a session through the East Midlands CRC here: emcrc.co.uk/booking.
Is your business based outside of this area? Not to worry, regional CRCs operate across all of England, simply select the appropriate region using the booking form above or choose “I’m not currently a member” to register.
Monitor Your Environment with CyberAlarm
Best for: Businesses without existing cyber security monitoring.
Last but most certainly not least is CyberAlarm. This tool, funded by the Home Office, helps organisations identify known vulnerabilities and understand suspicious and potentially malicious activity targeting them from the internet. It has multiple functions such as the ability to scan your website, specific IP addresses you own, and even monitor activity on your company firewall.
Police CyberAlarm | Free Cyber Threat Detection Tool →
What Next?
That’s a lot of information to take in, we know. Why not book a chat with a cyber security expert to help you find out where you stand? No pressure, no catch.