Most Cyber Essentials providers send you a self-assessment questionnaire and walk away. We do not.
Net Sec Group is an IASME Certification Body. We walk your estate, name the gaps, fix the gaps with you, run the assessment ourselves, and sign off the certificate. One operator, one engagement, one outcome.
Self-service Cyber Essentials providers ship you a questionnaire and a portal login. You read the controls, you decide what counts as in-scope, you write the answers, you submit. If anything fails, you fix it and retry. The certificate has your name on it because you did the work.
Hands-off Cyber Essentials runs the other way round. We do the work. The certificate still has your name on it because you sponsored and approved the engagement, but you do not author the answers, fix the gaps in your own time, or learn the framework first.
A scoped on-site or remote walk-through of your devices, identity layer, SaaS estate, firewalls, and supplier surface. The output is a written gap list with each item tied to a specific Cyber Essentials control.
Patching, configuration changes, MFA enrolment, account-management cleanup, MDM rollout, policy authoring. We remediate alongside your IT team or on our own where you delegate the change window to us.
NetSec is an IASME Certification Body, so the same operator that scoped and remediated also runs the assessment and issues the certificate. No second supplier, no handover risk, no scheduling gap.
For straightforward CE Basic on a confident estate, see our standard certification path instead.
We confirm what is in scope, what your deadline looks like, and which CE level you need. No commitment to proceed.
We walk the device estate, identity layer, SaaS surface, firewall configuration, supplier list, and patching cadence. You receive a written gap list mapped to the five Cyber Essentials controls.
Patches applied, MFA enrolled, accounts cleaned up, MDM rolled out where required. We work alongside your IT team or directly with your suppliers when you delegate the change window.
As an IASME Certification Body, we run the formal assessment and issue the certificate. CE Plus assessments include the hands-on technical verification on your estate. The certificate is valid for 12 months.
Continuous scanning and managed patching keep the controls in shape between renewals so the next assessment day is not a panic. See CE+ Assured Programme or Cyber 365.
A supplier to the Welsh NHS contacted us on a Tuesday morning. They had Cyber Essentials Basic. They needed CE Plus by Friday close to satisfy a contract renewal. By Tuesday afternoon we had walked the estate. By Wednesday end-of-day the gaps were closed. Thursday was the assessment. Friday morning the certificate was issued.
That is what hands-off looks like in practice.
Yes. Cyber Essentials certifies the controls on your estate, not the person who authored the answers. You sponsor the engagement, approve the remediation, and sign off the scope. The certificate is issued in your organisation's name and is valid for 12 months under the same scheme rules as a self-assessment.
Depends on the gap list and the cooperation of your IT team or MSP. CE Basic Fast Track returns the certificate within 12 hours of submission, standard within 48 hours. CE Plus typically lands inside 3-5 days from scoping call to certificate, faster when the deadline forces it.
We document the change requests, identify the controls each one closes, and present the package to the MSP and to your board. If the MSP cannot or will not deliver, we either delegate the change window to a sub-contracted team or replace the MSP's function on the affected controls for the engagement window. The scoping call covers what your MSP arrangement looks like.
The CE Basic and CE Plus published prices on our booking page are the assessment side. The scoping and remediation work that makes hands-off hands-off scales with the gap list. Most engagements land in the same band as a CE Bundle plus a half-day to full-day of consultancy. The scoping call gives you a written quote.
Try our cost calculator for a back-of-envelope figure.
IASME provides 12 months of complimentary £25,000 cyber insurance with every Cyber Essentials certificate, free for UK SMEs under £20M turnover. The insurance is between you and IASME. NetSec does not bundle, broker, or upsell it.
Book a 30-minute scoping call. We map your deadline, your estate, the gap list, and the cleanest path from where you are to the certificate.
Looking for the buyer-syntax variant? CE done for you.