If someone wanted to cause serious damage to your organisation, where would they start? Not with your filing cabinets. Not with your server room. They’d probably start with your Microsoft 365 tenant, because that’s where your emails, files and customer data live, and where your entire operation runs. Thankfully, Microsoft 365 comes with powerful security capabilities built in. However, having those capabilities and being protected by them are two different things.
Your business almost certainly runs on cloud services. From document storage, email and finance software to your customer data and internal systems, the chances are that most of what keeps your business operational lives, at least in part, in the cloud. And yet, for many businesses, the question of whether that cloud environment is secure rarely gets asked. It tends to be presumed. After all, you’ve got bigger things to worry about. You’re with a reputable provider.
Due diligence in a merger or acquisition is, by design, exhaustive. It brings a level of scrutiny that touches almost every part of a business. From financial audits and legal reviews to commercial assessments, buyers work hard to make sure nothing important gets missed. And yet there’s one area that continues to catch organisations off guard, even in the most professionally run due diligence processes: The cost of a data breach has never been higher. Digital estates have never been more complex.
Your business is growing. Your IT team is doing a solid job. And your cybersecurity feels like it’s broadly in order. You’ve got firewalls in place, antivirus software running, and backups happening somewhere. But there’s a nagging question that won’t quite go away; Do you actually know where you stand from a cybersecurity perspective? For many organisations, the honest answer is no. Not really.
Microsoft 365 is one of the most widely used business platforms in the world. However, most businesses use only a fraction of what it offers, and leave some of its most important security features either switched off or set up incorrectly. M365 offers far more than the productivity tools we are all familiar with, like Outlook, Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Used properly, it’s a powerful cybersecurity platform. Used poorly, it offers a false sense of protection.
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.
A virtual CISO is your on-demand cybersecurity resource. We provide the same strategic leadership as an in-house CISO, without the full-time commitment. vCISOs are used by organisations that need experienced security leadership to meet their compliance requirements, manage cyber risk, and guide security decisions, but don’t yet have a permanent CISO, or may have an interim requirement for a vCISO.
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With decades of experience, KEEP is a trusted Cyber Security Consultancy, providing tailored solutions for clients ranging from Critical National Infrastructure to SMBs.
We work with organizations in the UK and globally delivering projects, guidance and outcomes suited to your business sector, risk preferences, and financial capacity; targeting the highest level of cyber security for your organisation.
Our Services:
- Assurance Services: Our Assurance Services enable you to understand and quantify your current risks and vulnerabilities to prioritise their remediation.
- Risk Management: Without Risk Assessment and Management, fundamental security falters. Let our Consultants guide you and prioritise the actions that are most relevant to your organisation, threat profile, risk appetite and resources.
- Managed Security Services: Our Managed Services provide the benefits and scale of outsourcing with the knowledge and skills of our consultants and analysts.
- Microsoft Cloud Security Services: We are experts in Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender XDR.
Solutions To Your Cyber Security Challenges.