For many organisations, achieving Cyber Essentials marks a valuable milestone. It protects against the most common cyber threats, reassures clients and insurers, and establishes a baseline of good practice.
But the truth is: Cyber Essentials is not the finish line. It’s the foundation.
As your business grows, takes on more users, more sites, more cloud systems, the cyber risk grows too. The basic controls covered by Cyber Essentials no longer deliver full protection on their own.
To stay secure, compliant and resilient, businesses need to move beyond Cyber Essentials and pursue what we call Cyber Excellence.
Why Cyber Essentials Alone Isn’t Enough for Growing Businesses
Cyber Essentials focuses on the essential hygiene, but it doesn’t cover:
• Advanced phishing and ransomware techniques
• Insight across hybrid and cloud environments
• Real-time threat detection and monitoring
• Identity risk from a growing user base
• Strong backup, disaster recovery and business continuity
• Security governance, policy management and user behaviour
As your organisation evolves, these risks become more likely and more impactful.
What Cyber Excellence Looks Like
Cyber Excellence is the stage when you shift from reacting to incidents to preventing them. It combines stronger technology, smarter processes and better people. Here’s how 4th Platform helps firms reach that stage:
Advanced Threat Protection
We deploy tools that go beyond standard anti-virus to include endpoint detection and response, behaviour-based analytics and automated threat isolation.
Continuous Monitoring and Reporting
Rather than a one-off check, we provide 24/7 monitoring that ensures visibility into your security state and alerts when things go off-track.
Email Security and Phishing Defence
Since most breaches begin with email, our solutions include advanced filtering, impersonation protection and link scanning to reduce your exposure.
Identity and Access Management
With growth comes greater identity risk. We implement multi‐factor authentication, conditional access and privileged access management to ensure only the right people access your systems.
Backup Hardening and Disaster Recovery
We ensure you have immutable backups, off-site storage, tested recovery procedures and clear recovery time targets so your business can bounce back.
Security Governance and Policy
Security becomes an ongoing disciplined process. We help you build policies, assign ownership, measure performance and report accurately to stakeholders.
The Benefits of Moving to Cyber Excellence
Businesses that mature beyond the basics experience:
• Lower risk of breach and regulatory exposure
• Improved readiness for cyber-insurance requirements
• Enhanced client trust through stronger cybersecurity posture
• Increased uptime and less disruption from cyber-incidents
• More time freed up for staff to focus on core business, not firefighting IT
Growing firms can no longer rely on “good enough” security. They need maturity, visibility and control.
How 4th Platform Helps You Make the Leap
If you have achieved Cyber Essentials and are ready to strengthen your protection, 4th Platform offers the expertise and technology to take you further:
• End-to-end cybersecurity strategy and deployment
• Managed IT services that optimise your infrastructure and security posture
• Digital transformation services ensuring your tech scales with you
• AI and analytics solutions that enhance threat detection and operational efficiency
• Unified communications and cloud-based collaboration with secure architecture
Our approach is aligned with your growth ambitions and regulatory requirements. We become your strategic partner in cybersecurity and technology.
Ready to Move From Compliance to Resilience?
If your organisation is ready to move from baseline protection to full cyber maturity, let’s talk.
Schedule your discovery meeting with 4th Platform today.
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