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It was announced today that by Digital Economy Minister Ed Vaizey (follow this link to the full document) that :

The UK’s 350 largest businesses – FTSE 350 firms – are being urged to take part in the free Cyber Health Check to help them understand and improve their level of cyber security. Companies will receive a confidential, tailored report enabling them to understand boardroom trends, compare themselves to their peers and address any weaknesses identified. The health check also generates aggregated data showing how well the top UK companies are performing.

Now, feel free to correct if we are completely wrong but surely a FTSE 350 company must currently invest significant funds into their IT infrastructure, staff, policies and procedures, training and everything “cyber” to make sure they can function  – so how come they qualify for a free confidential tailored report yet nothing similar is offered to SME’s who will need this type of report to help them progress as a business?

@BusinessGov did respond to our tweet mentioning a closed Innovation Voucher Scheme that may reopen (but then again it may not), but this is a lottery, there is no guarantee  that after doing an application for something that may be a key part to your small business succeeding you can actually get the funding you need (bearing in mind you have to pay your supplier and then claim it back  if you are successful !)

We were grateful to see that IASME agreed that SME’s need the funding to help them become more aware and compliant.

But moving on and playing “What if”…..

Now, it is our understanding that for to bid for certain types of Central Government contracts that “involve handling personal information and providing certain ICT products and services” (link to full document here) that it is mandatory for bidders to have Cyber Essentials certification.  It is also recommend that this level of certification should be adopted by others (and from this we assume Local Authorities, Businesses etc).

The Cyber Essentials scheme comes in two flavours,  the self assessment “entry level” and the more complex Cyber Essentials Plus.  Full details on the scheme and details etc are available here.

As a rough guide, Cyber Essentials would cost roughly £300 and Cyber Essentials Plus costing from £1000+ but this does not include any of the time to writing the necessary policies, fully understanding the requirements and procedures (training) or keeping them up to date.  The fees are annual, so think of it as a Digital MOT – technically only valid on the day of the assessment unless you commit and implement everything on a daily basis.

In theory this  is a great idea until you look at some practicalities in terms of the Micro/Small Business , especially if the scheme was to be rolled outside the Central Government procurement process.

Most Small IT Businesses start by ordering a PC or two, a broadband connection and plug in and go.

They can do their job, they can make money to help grow the business. Employ more staff, buy more PC’s, create a network – again, a simple plug and play affair these days.

They may need external IT assistance occasionally if problems occur, but on a day to day basis, why do they need to pay for another member of staff to be on hand “just in case” ?.

They write their code/website/database/application/do support/etc and they are good at what they do.

Taking the Government recommendation that Cyber Essentials certification should be adopted by others, so for our example we’ll pick Local Authorities.  “IT” Projects would need Cyber Essentials certification for businesses dealing with projects that dealt with  personal information. This style of project could be as simple as a website where users are allowed to fill in a contact form, not exactly a high tech IT project.

Now the company bidding for the contract may use IT tools that would be applicable for the project they are bidding for, yet they may not know what to do if their network failed or their email was compromised.

If you were not a IT Geek, would this make any sense to you ?

• “Have all commonly attacked and vulnerable services (such as Server Message Block (SMB) NetBIOSm tftp, RPC, rlogin, rsh, rexec) been disabled or blocked by default at the boundary firewalls?”
• “Have all open ports and services on each firewall (or similar device) been subject to justification and approval by an appropriately qualified and authorised business representative, and has this approval been properly documented?”
• “Has all unnecessary software, including OS utilities, services and applications, been removed or disabled”
• “Are users prevented from running executable code or programs form any media to which they also have write access?”

The Cyber Essentials questionnaire covers a wide range of security topics as you would expect but IF the certification scheme was to apply to Local Government/Authorities/Departments procurement procedures – the level of knowledge required to pass at basic level may automatically disqualify a lot of Micro and Small Businesses.

Hands up – it’s all examples, conjecture and Devil’s Advocate but….

Whilst education is the key, if something isn’t relevant to your core business do you spend the cash and try to maintain your in-house IT Systems to the required “standard”, do you pay someone else to do it, do you ignore any local authority style procurement if adoption of Cyber Essentials made it that far?

We’re not sure what the answer is (yet), but giving away an undisclosed sum of money for a “Free Cyber Health Check” to the FTSE 350 companies who should a) be in a position to pay for it and b) being “cyber health checked” on a regular basis,  isn’t going to help support or educate the Micro and Small Businesses with the necessary “Cyber” skills potentially needed in the future.

Update 19th November 2015 – Apparently the Cyber Security Innovation Vouchers – Round 14  is still open until 5th January 2016.  More information on the Innovate UK website

Having had the first fibre installation on our new BT Cabinet back in April 2015, we were a little surprised to be asked for a quote and to take part in a photo opportunity !

Everleigh had an interesting telecoms infrastructure, where the amount of lines available in the village exceeded the demand (even for a basic telephone service).  When ADSL broadband started to become a requirement for local businesses and households, these limits started to cause problems in every day life which included : read more

Choosing a VoIP number for your business

Hopefully Part 1 of our VoIP Guide gave some food for thought, and that is the reason you are reading this article about moving towards a VoIP telephony system for your business.

One of the next things to consider on your VoIP move is the type of telephone number you need for your business .

This number can be

• A geographical number i.e starting 01 or 02
• A 03xx – these numbers were introduced as UK Wide numbers as an alternative to chargeable 08 numbers
• A 084x/087x style number
• A 0800 style Freephone number

Need more than one number? This isn’t a problem!

Some businesses often have multiple geographical numbers for advertising a “local” presence in areas outside their dialling code, or have multiple local numbers to differentiate between different departments.

Do you want each employee to have a direct dial number ? If so, it is worth ordering these in one go so that you have a range of consecutive numbers that you can assign to your staff. It would be advisable to order more VoIP numbers than you actually need at the present time to cope with increases in staff levels.

Do you already have a telephone number you would like to use, such as your current landline number? In most cases, an existing landline can be “ported” to VoIP for a small fee. You can find out more about number porting in our VoIP Number porting article.

Technical Note : One thing that can be a bit confusing with VoIP is that one number does not mean you can only take one call as with a normal landline.

With a typical landline number (excluding any PBX or features installed), you can only make OR receive one call at a time. With VoIP, you can have one telephone number that has multiple lines (in VoIP terminology – channels). The number of channels you need normally varies, depending the amount of calls your business will be making, simultaneously.

Interested on finding out more or have any questions ? Please contact us to discuss your VoIP requirements

This is a the first part of a series of VoIP Guides, to try and help in a non technical way, as to why VoIP can help your small business.  Using some examples we have come accross with our clients who have made the switch to VoIP for their small businesses, hopefully we can provide some food for thought and ideally save you some money ! Whilst we mention small business, this is applicable whether you are a sole trader, partnership, SME, or larger organisation.

Traditionally, most businesses, no matter how small, will use a telephone system for making and receiving calls. This will most likely start off as a simple landline where you can make or receive one call at a time, progressing through to multiple lines and extra features as your business grows. read more

Over the last couple of months there has been an increase in the amount of calls, post and emails received here at Hightrees.  The interesting point is that the name , the company name and job title are for someone who has NO connection with us at all.

A little bit of Google research showed that the name, position did belong to a company in the UK with a variation of our company name.

Normally this type of thing would get filed in the junk folder or thrown on the fire, but after receiving a phone call from the PR and Events promotion team from a large well known UK Football team, it appeared to us that this appeared to be a new data source, so it seemed like a good idea to play detective.

A few telephone calls were returned and we got a standard “we can not divulge that information” but you have been removed from our system.

Attempts to contact the organisations sending emails disappeared into the ether as well – not looking good….until yesterday.

A very polite email from a UK company, addressed to the wrong person but using our email address arrived, so a quick verification of their email details against their website should it was a reputable company and so a response was sent asking for where our information had come from. To be honest, we weren’t expecting a response but Jon was extremely helpful and cited where their information came from as well as a website plus doing the decent thing and removed the incorrect information.

Armed with a cuppa, expecting a long argument, we called the Email List Marketing company in question, and somewhat to our surprise, they immediately divulged where the data had come from after we had supplied a few details based on their customer who had emailed us, along with a contact phone number.

Alarm bells were ringing at this point as to what impact this information mismatch could cause, so a hasty call was made to their ICC and Compliance Department.

After explaining the problem, we were told that it might be tricky to trace where the information was being mis-matched but the incorrect data was identified fairly quickly (admittedly more by luck!).  The member of staff sounded genuinely surprised that this had occurred.  The cause is unknown as it comes from multiple sources, however their internal verification process should stop this and it looks like Hightrees was the unlikely in getting “lost” in the system.

End result : We have been told verbally that there will be a supression on that information until such a time it is correct and there is no “financial” impact in this faulty data match.  Unfortuantely there is no way of telling how much of this incorrect data has been sold, referenced or distributed so we can probably expect more junk in assorted forms for a while.  An email confirming the corrections has been received, with the cause of the problem most likely pointing to “human error”.

We’d like to thank those who were willing to help get to the bottom of this information mismatch – especially the Chris @ Dun and Bradstreet Customer Services for confirming that all of the incorrect data has been corrected.

Oh, and the irony ? A Twitter post from the US side of D&B “Marketers need accurate #data to better engage/target buyers with data-driven #marketing” ! You can see the article here

We were highly surprised when we recently got a letter to say that Hightrees Organisation had been nominated for an award at the  local Tidworth Community Area Awards 2015 and even more surprised when we won the Visit the Tidworth & District Chamber of Commerce Cup for our IT, Web and VoIP services to the Everleigh community.

We would like to thank everyone who nominated us for this award as well as to pass on our congratulations to all the other worthy community nominees and winners !