Access to Business (A2B) is the Wolverhampton based charity that supportsdisadvantaged people in the Black Country towards training, employment and self-employment and enterprise.

The charity is an independent and authoritative advocate for those with healthproblems and disabilities, offering intensive one to one support and runningtraining courses in IT and finance.

In 2017, A2B were awarded the 'Queens Award for Voluntary Service' which is thehighest award given to volunteer groups across the UK.

About Access to Business

ACCESS TOBUSINESSA Cyber Essentials Journeyin the Charity Sector

IntroductionDuring the Spring lockdown, A2B managed to put their services online in a recordtime in order to continue supporting their clients and in the same year becameCyber Essentials certified.

In the year COVID 19 forced businesses to close their doors to their customersand operate entirely online, Access to Business managed to very quickly turnthings around and find new ways to support their clients.

"Cyber security essentials checklist helped usto understand what we have to put in place toensure compliance while working from home.We engaged with our IT Consultants, PedmoreComputer Services Ltd and Tinsley NET ITSupport Services to obtain specialist adviceand support.

It was useful to go through the CyberEssentials Self-Assessment questionnaire toensure you are consistent in your approachand do not do too much or too little. When wesubmitted our assessment, we received thefeedback that our router was out of date!

We only had a couple of days to make changesand with the support of our IT consultants wemanaged to upgrade the router to a newcompliant one. Overall, we made severalimportant changes to systems and proceduresand also received a Cyber Security Insurancecover as part of our accreditation. I feelconfident to know that we comply withessential standards and our data/systems aresafe.

I felt that the whole process was very helpful.Our Chief Executive and the board were verysupportive, everyone understands howimportant it is and validated the money andtime invested." Elvira Wilson, the Business,Finance and Compliance manager at A2B

"We are quite a medium size charity, with 22employees, and it is important for us whenprocuring contracts to demonstrate the quality ofour work. We already have ISO 9001, Matrixquality standards, and also Disability ConfidentLeader quality framework.Last year our websitewas badly hacked and we were unable to clean itout so we had to totally re-write the wholewebsite.

It was a difficult exercise and a very worryingexperience.Cyber security and data protection wasalways very important to us but it was difficult toknow if we were doing everything that we should.We also started to notice that contracts wereincreasingly asking for Cyber Essentialscertification and we realised that this pathwayreally fitted in very well with what we needed todo."

"We had a look at different schemes, but CyberEssentials was affordable and it also includedcyber insurance. We felt positive when we loggedon to the Cyber Essentials questionnaire for thefirst time in February, and although we didn'tsatisfy everything straight away, we took ourtime to try to improve systems and work throughdifferent processes, for example, enabling somedual authentication.

Of course, half-way through this process, we allhad to work from home so things were even moredifficult. When we started to work from home,we had to provide staff with IT equipment towork from home."

If you're a registered charity, visit IASME'swebsite to find your local participating

certification body and apply for a discountedcyber security certification between 2nd and

6th of November 2020

Check out the onlineAccess to Businessprograms by cl icking here

Follow A2B on Twitterhere

The Problem

The Solution

The Experience

@IASME1 @CyberEssentials www.iasme.co.uk

#cybersecurecharities