Tag Archives: Cyber Essentials

The NCSC Annual Review 2025: Between Capability and Stasis

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The article examines the NCSC Annual Review 2025 as both a testament to accomplishment and a warning. It praises the NCSC’s technical competence but questions its identity: regulator, delivery agency, or state-backed market player? It highlights contradictions — DSIT hailing it as “the jewel in the crown” while eroding its remit, diluting CyberFirst into TechFirst, ending its startup work, and overstating the benefits of Cyber Essentials. The piece concludes that the NCSC is overextended and under-defined, needing clarity of purpose more than new initiatives — less performance, more direction.

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UK Cyber at a Crossroads: Three Essays on Policy, Practice, and Growth, in Reaction to the 2025 Cyber Growth Action Plan

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The UK’s cyber policy has made progress but suffers from churn, overlap, and regional imbalance. The 2025 Cyber Policy sets out ambition but lacks continuity and practitioner voice. This three-part series traces the history, critiques the new policy, and argues for a practitioner-led, regionally balanced ecosystem to stabilise the base finally.

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Stabilising the Base: From Patchwork to Platform in the UK Cyber Ecosystem

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This article argues that stabilisation must be the UK’s priority. Drawing together the lessons of history and the critique of the DSIT Cyber Growth Action Plan 2025, it calls for a practitioner-led ecosystem that ends programme churn, addresses regional imbalance, unlocks university IP, and resists government attempts to build commercial products. The vision is of hubs and networks rooted in delivery and credibility — a cyber base resilient enough to sustain long-term growth. Unless these foundations are secured, the UK will remain trapped in cycles of ambition without durability.

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A Potted History of the UK’s Cyber Economy: From Secrecy to Sector

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This article, written in reaction to the DSIT Cyber Growth Action Plan 2025, traces the uneven history of the UK’s cyber economy. From CESG’s secretive assurance role to NCSC’s public authority and DSIT’s contested remit, the story is one of incremental gains but persistent churn. Programmes such as Cyber Essentials, CyberFirst, CyberASAP, Cyber Runway, and Cyber Resilience Centres have delivered value but lacked continuity, scale, and coherence. Unless the government commits to stabilisation and long-term delivery, the UK will continue to recycle initiatives rather than build a durable cyber base.

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A Brief History of the Terms: Risk Assessment, Risk Management, and GRC

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This article explores the historical development and convergence of three foundational concepts in organisational security: risk assessment, risk management, governance, risk, and compliance (GRC). Tracing their origins in engineering, finance, and corporate governance, it charts their institutionalisation across the UK and their modern evolution into digital, real-time resilience frameworks that underpin enterprise cybersecurity and compliance today.

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Mapping the Global Security Landscape: Where CRT Fits (and Where It Doesn’t)

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This blog article critically examines the global landscape of consumer product cybersecurity standards and the proposed role of the UK’s Cyber Resilience Testing (CRT) initiative. It maps key frameworks (PSTI Act, CRA, ETSI EN 303645, IEC 62443, FCC labelling, etc.) and identifies opportunities for CRT to provide ‘above and beyond’ assurance through resilience testing and threat simulation. While acknowledging the challenges of market saturation and standard overlap, it argues that CRT can add unique value — especially in underregulated sectors and poorly enforced product classes — by validating real-world security outcomes rather than static compliance.

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Cyber Governance at a Crossroads: Responding to DSIT’s Consultation

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This framing article summarises a set of responses to DSIT’s Cyber Governance Code of Practice consultation in Jan/Feb 2024. It highlights practitioner and institutional submissions, alongside thematic deep dives on law, assurance, incentives, and professionalism. The message: DSIT asked the right questions, but the hardest answers were still missing.

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From Cyber Essentials to Corporate Governance: Raising the Bar

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Cyber Essentials has value as a baseline, but reaches only 0.3% of UK organisations and says little about governance. This article argues that DSIT’s Cyber Governance Code of Practice must raise the bar, from compliance to accountability, from self-attestation to credible assurance, and from one-off certificates to continuous governance. Cyber Essentials is the floor; governance must be the ceiling.

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Why Self-Attestation Doesn’t Work: Lessons for the DSIT Code

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This article argues that self-attestation has failed as a credible assurance mechanism, citing Cyber Essentials’ low uptake and ISO 27001’s limits. It warns that if DSIT builds the Cyber Governance Code of Practice on self-assessment, it will fail. To succeed, the Code must mandate independent, accredited assurance that directors, investors, and regulators can trust.

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Directors and Cyber Governance: My Practitioner’s Response to DSIT’s Consultation

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This article revisits my practitioner-led response to DSIT’s 2024 consultation on the Cyber Governance Code of Practice. It highlights key issues I raised: supply chain risk, flaws in self-attestation, tool overload, lack of incentives, and the need for continuous governance. The argument is simple: cyber resilience belongs in the boardroom, but only if policy is grounded in practice.

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