Cyber Essentials Case Study - McCoda

McCODA Limited is a customer-focused building and civil engineering company working on the UK rail infrastructure.

The Brief/Challenge

McCoda is a building & civil engineering company founded in 2013 located in Kent. The company provide a wide range of project delivery services to the rail industry and work with their customers to deliver a first-class service on time, on budget and without compromising health, safety, quality of the environment.

For McCoda to tender for projects they were finding there was a requirement to have a series of compliance standards in place. This is common in supply chain tendering where the large conglomerate company is expecting all suppliers to adhere to industry standards.

A more frequent requirement is that the business holds a Cyber Essentials certification. LP Networks are McCoda’s IT service provider. They reached out to LP Networks to assist them with their online application for Cyber Essentials.

Cyber Essentials is a UK Government standard defined by the National Cyber Security Centre and delivered by their partner IASME. IASME is a UK government information assurance scheme that encourages organisations to adopt good practices in information security. It includes an assurance framework and a simple set of security controls to protect information from threats coming from the internet. LP Networks have recently been accredited as a Certification body for this standard.

The Cyber Essentials accreditation is a self-certification, where via the online portal, the business qualifies a series of answers around the 5 core topics of perimeter firewalls, secure configurations, access control, malware protection and patch management.

The Solution

McCoda found they were not able to answer successfully questions related to their Cyber Security status. As mentioned above and being a trusted advisor to McCoda, LP Networks were asked to consult and provide guidance around the questions that relate to processes, procedures and tools used within the business.

With office restrictions in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic, LP Networks joined McCoda personnel via Microsoft Teams, the session involved going through each question individually and providing an accurate answer within the online assessment.

Naturally during this process, we found some areas that in practice could be improved on to which the business has but measure in place.

Benefits

Completing the exercise with an experienced Security officer from LP Networks, allowed McCoda to complete the form accurately and have peace of mind that any investment is relevant.

On the attainment of the certification Cyber Essentials, it will provide McCoda with:-

• More opportunity to tender for work

• Improved awareness of Cyber Security within the business

• It reassures McCoda customers that they do indeed take cyber security

• Reduce the risk and strengthen the resolve to Cyber security threats

• It’s the first step towards Cyber Essentials Plus, IASME Gold, ISO 207001 accreditations