Stephen Hall, Managing Director at Active Housing said that “I’m delighted that we have been awarded the Cyber Essentials Plus certification on the first attempt. Hopefully this shows our dedication and commitment to providing high quality secure solutions to the social housing sector”.

What is Cyber Essentials Plus?

Cyber Essentials Plus is a government-backed certification scheme within the UK, that helps organisations enforce cyber security policies and industry-wide techniques, which can combat the most common types of cyber-attacks.

The government programme accounts for two certifications - one being a self-serviced certification (Cyber Essentials), alongside the latter Cyber Essentials Plus, which also requires a technical verification/assessment that is accounted for by a government-approved adjudicator.

Active Housing have been able to provide clear evidence against all technical controls associated with the audit that was carried out. No issues have been identified which would've prevented the award of the certification.

Why now?

As a software-as-a-service provider for the social housing sector, it was important to us that customers have peace of mind knowing that their data is safe, each time they input into and process their data within our software solutions such as the Active Portal and Active Diagnostics.

Recent investigations carried out by the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH), revealed that there had been 146 investigations into potential data breaches of the consumer standards. This has gone up by 32% from when they previously investigated between 2020 and 2021 (Source: Inside Housing). 

Knowing this, only having internal policies for cyber security to stay secure in the social housing sector is simply not enough. Organisations operating in our sector must go above and beyond to protect their customers, which is exactly what we have been doing and will continue to do in our ever-changing digital landscape.

Despite our solutions already being secure by design, enforcing Cyber Essentials Plus techniques and best practice acts as further protection against cyber threats. It also demonstrates Active Housing’s commitment to cyber security within the social housing sector.

What does this mean for current and future customers?

Whether you are a current customer or someone looking to integrate our services and solutions within your organisation, cyber security policies which were previously in place have now been reinforced even more to ensure the security of your data. All of this comes without any compromise to our existing solutions, that have already been built with tenants in mind. The core user experience remains the same, but you can gain further peace of mind knowing that we adopt and enforce government-recommended cyber security practices during daily operations.

It is important that other social housing suppliers also follow suit, especially after the attack which targeted Redcar and Cleveland Council in 2020, which reportedly cost them £10.4m for their infrastructure rebuild (Source: Housing Technology).

If you have any questions regarding Cyber Essentials Plus or are unsure on any of the topics raised, feel free to get in touch or book a meeting.