Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Most organisations that get hit by a serious cyber attack weren’t careless: Ransomware, supply chain attacks and identity-based breaches aren’t hypothetical risks anymore. They happen to businesses and public sector organisations of every size, across every sector. And the ones that come through them best aren’t necessarily those with the biggest security budgets.

Most organisations have more cybersecurity tools than they realise. However, having those things isn’t the same as being secure. At some point, someone, like a Board member, insurer or regulator, is going to ask you to demonstrate that your security works. Not just that you have policies in place, but you can detect an attack, respond to it and recover from it. When that moment comes, you’ll want to know the answer. That’s what a cyber maturity assessment is designed to find.

Cyber attacks cost UK businesses an estimated £14.7bn every year. The average cost of a significant breach for an individual business sits at almost £195,000. Half of all small businesses have experienced at least one attack in the past 12 months. For medium and large organisations, that figure rises to 82%. Those numbers should focus the mind.

KEEP helps organisations large and small to achieve both Cyber Essentials (CE) and Cyber Essentials Plus (CE+), alongside some of the more stringent standards such as SOC2, though for this insight we will focus on how to ‘pass’ CE+. As you may be aware IASME introduced the Danzell v3.3 standard in mid 2026, which included a number of critical changes that aimed to set the bar ‘higher’ for an organisation who applied for a CE+ assessment.