Not just a certificate. Real protection — across Microsoft 365, endpoints, email, identity, backups and incident response.

Cyber Essentials is a UK government certification covering five baseline controls — firewalls, secure configuration, user access, malware protection, patch management. It's the floor. Cyber security is everything else: identity and MFA, email protection, endpoint detection and response, backup integrity, 24/7 monitoring, and incident response. CE proves the baseline. The rest is what stops the breach. See our Cyber Essentials service for the certification side.

Probably yes — but not the way a bank does. Attacks happen overnight and at weekends because that's when nobody is watching. A small-business SOC tier (around £15–£20 per user per month on top of managed IT) gives you out-of-hours triage of Microsoft 365 and endpoint alerts by humans, not just automated noise. Whether you need it depends on the data you hold and the contractual obligations you carry — we'll tell you honestly during a 30-minute review.

Three layers. (1) Stop it landing: MFA on every account, blocked legacy authentication, email security with link rewriting and impersonation detection, EDR on every endpoint. (2) Stop it spreading: least-privilege admin, segregated backups, conditional access. (3) Recover without paying: immutable third-party backup of Microsoft 365 and servers, quarterly restore tests, a documented incident playbook. The third layer is the one most businesses skip — and the one that decides whether ransomware is a bad week or a bad year.

Yes. The big six in UK SMB cyber insurance applications are: MFA on all admin and remote access, endpoint detection and response (not just antivirus), immutable or segregated backup, email security with attachment/link inspection, an annual cyber awareness training programme, and a documented incident response plan. We deliver all six as part of the Plus and Complete tiers, and we complete the insurer questionnaires for you.

Business Premium gives you the right licences — Defender, Intune, Entra ID P1, conditional access — but most tenants we audit have less than 30% of those features actually configured. The licence is the toolbox; what you need is somebody who turns the tools on, tunes them, and watches the alerts. That's what "cyber security" actually means day-to-day.

Call 0161 503 3535 first — even before reading this page. We've handled active incidents for businesses we've never worked with before, including ransomware in progress and email account compromise. The first hour matters most: isolate, preserve evidence, communicate. We can be on it inside 15 minutes during business hours and inside 60 minutes out-of-hours. There's no engagement contract required to take the first call.

Most clients move both managed IT and cyber security to us together, because they overlap heavily — the same people who manage your accounts also enforce MFA, run patching, configure Defender and watch the backups. We can run as a security overlay alongside an existing IT provider for short-term engagements (CE+ project, incident response retainer, M365 hardening), but for ongoing managed cyber security we genuinely do it better when we own the whole stack.

Yes. Inology IT is ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certified, Cyber Essentials certified, and a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Modern Work. We use the same tooling on our own network that we deploy on yours — MFA, conditional access, Defender for Business, immutable backup, the lot. If we can't run it ourselves, we won't sell it to you.