We now have information on how to do a right to work check.

The Home Office has published their guidance on right to work checks for employers that apply from 1 July 2021.

Retrospective checks are not required for EU, EEA and Swiss citizens who commenced work before 1 July 2021.  You should ensure that your right to work procedures are updated in line with the revised guidance.

We can help you to navigate these changes.  Get in touch at sarah@ignitepeoplesolutions.co.uk

Business owners and leaders are constantly learning new things and as a relatively recent business owner I am no exception.  I am always seeking advice, and trying to find the best people to help me make the business a success.

A great example is marketing.  Coming from a technical and consulting background, this is not really my area of strength.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve picked up a lot over the years, and I’ve managed, through luck or judgement or some combination of both to do enough to get the business into a pretty good place in our first three years.  But when it came to the point where we decided to put some real focus on our marketing, I wasn’t really too sure where to start.

Clearly there are many aspects to marketing a business, whether you’re new or established.  I knew I needed some help, but to whom should I turn?  Should I employ someone, or use an agency?  Should I look for a generalist, or a specialist (or a number of different specialists)?  I know that I prefer working with specialists, but if I pick a specialist in one area, am I neglecting other important areas?

The problem, for me, was that not having sufficient experience or knowledge of the area that I needed help with, I wasn’t sure how to articulate exactly what help I was looking for.

I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

Fortunately, I managed to find my way through this with some advice from friends in the field, and some trial and error, and I’m confident that we’re now on the right track.  However, if there had been a course or workshop that I had come across that would have helped me figure out the key areas that I needed to consider, key questions to ask myself and guide me towards some priorities, I would definitely have jumped at that.  I’m sure they exist; I just didn’t find them.

When it comes to Cyber Security and managing the risks to a business, I frequently see exactly the same scenario.  Business owners, and senior management teams know that their business is at significant risk from Cyber Attacks, ransomware, email-based fraud and similar, and many know they need help.  Their IT department, or external IT provider looks after some of the technical aspects of security but they’re often not specialists in security – they’re typically more focused on keeping the lights on and implementing new technology to help the business stay ahead.   Rightly so.  The owner, or leadership team, however, has this nagging feeling that they should definitely be doing more.  They know they need some help.

But they don’t know what they don’t know.

Our Cyber Security for Business Owners and Leaders training is, for security, exactly what I was looking for when I needed help with marketing.

The point of the one-day training workshop is not to make you a security expert.  It’s not designed to scare you into buying services from us (although it might scare you a bit).  It’s purpose is to help you understand what you don’t know – what’s important, what to look at and prioritise when it comes to security, and where to go for help that you can trust.  But  it’s more than just telling you.

Yes, we provide you with lots of information, all geared towards owners and senior management teams, but it’s a bit of a whirlwind “voyage of discovery”.  Through carefully designed exercises and discussions, we’ll help YOU discover how to determine what is important to your business, how to assess risks and impacts in a security context, and how to build a strategy and plan to improve security and reduce business risk.

Want to find out more? You can contact us to talk through your needs or alternatively go online and book yourself on to the next available course.

Welcome to our new team member – Kate – a Diversity, Inclusion and belonging Specialist

Diversity refers to the characteristics that make people unique.  Inclusion refers to the behaviours and cultural norms that make people feel welcome.  Belonging refers to an individual sense of acceptance.

Regardless of whether you’re new to business or leadership, or you have been in business for a while, when you first start to take your cyber security approach seriously, you may well discover that your first challenge is where to start.

There are many different elements to cyber security, and lots of different ways to approach it once you start looking at the detail of all of the things you need to do, but in terms of your starting point there are really two fundamental approaches that you can choose to take.

The first approach is to pick a framework or a set of standards and work towards that.

A bit of research will show you that there are a number of frameworks that you could pick from.  Standards like Cyber Essentials, CIS controls, or ISO standards (27001 for example).  All vary somewhat, and have a slightly different focus, but there are certainly some common themes running through most of these standards or frameworks.

The nature of frameworks however is that they are trying to be all things to all people; it is extremely difficult to create a framework which is equally applicable to all types of businesses or organisation.  So how do you know which one is most applicable to you, and which one to pick if that’s the cyber security approach you are going to take?  That’s not an easy question to answer.

Following a framework is one valid approach to cyber security.  It gives you something to work towards.  But how applicable is it to your organisation?  Answering this question is not something that you need to be considering alone and from within the walls of your organisation.

Not only can we support you in gaining ISO 27001 accreditation or Cyber Essentials Certification, training and awareness are something we strongly believe in and to this end we have built a number of training courses and workshops.  These will not only inform and educate but will also empower the right people in the right roles to be able to ask and answer the most relevant questions for your business.

Rather than focusing on frameworks, you may decide to instead take a risk-based cyber security approach.  This is an approach that is more tailored towards your specific business or organisation.  It considers the specific data that you have, the systems you use, the people you have in your organisation and their level of understanding of all things security, the processes that you have in place, and how all of these combine to create risk specific to you.

How this happens depends on who you partner with.  Our approach is to come in to your business and run discovery workshops on site with your teams.  This enables a depth of understanding which allows for the development of the most relevant and workable cyber security roadmap to you – a roadmap that will get you to a position where your risks are being proactively managed.

Different organisations, different security requirements – What sort of differences are we talking about though?  Let’s look at three key differences.

Firstly there is data.  Some organisations are heavily reliant on data, some not so much.  Some organisations collect and process particularly confidential or sensitive data, such as health data for instance.  Whatever data or sensitive information your business handles, it is of paramount importance to ensure you fully understand the implications of a data breach for you, your customers and those whose data you hold.

Some organisations have only employed staff, where elements of security policy can be made part of their employment contract and ongoing training, whereas other organisations have a heavy reliance on freelancers or subcontract staff where this is not so easy.  Management of systems used by these groups also differs in its level of practicality; managing and controlling devices which are company supplied is one thing, but devices owned by a freelancer or subcontractor present a particular challenge.

And third we have technology and technical infrastructure.  Every single business is unique in this aspect, so to this end there is no “out of the box” solution to understanding what risks your specific solutions and set-up pose.  Whilst it is a key part of understanding your business, we would also advocate that increasing awareness amongst your staff should be front of mind when choosing how you approach cyber security.

Security is all about risk – appreciating it, understanding it, and reducing, mitigating or sometimes accepting it.  Building confidence in your organisation and across all teams and departments is not something that should be left as a nice to have part of your cyber security approach.  Investing in your people as well as technology and advice, will go a long way to ensuring you are as best protected as you can be from cyber threats.