Cyber Essentials is a United Kingdom government information assurance scheme that is operated by the National Cyber Security Centre. It encourages organisations to adopt good practice in information security. Cyber Essentials also includes an assurance framework and a simple set of security controls to protect information from threats coming from the internet.

IT Services has renewed the University’s Cyber Essentials compliance for the next year and the renewed certification will last until 2nd March 2022. It is assessed/renewed on an annual basis.

From 1 October 2014, the Government required all suppliers bidding for contracts involving the handling of certain sensitive and personal information to be certified against the Cyber Essentials scheme. The accreditation is important to the University, because in 2018 this certification was mandated for all Government contracts, including research and other services provided by the University.

The scope of the current certification is the University of Manchester IT network and infrastructure managed and maintained by IT Services. Systems unmanaged by IT Services, such as home PCs are out of scope.

Our Cyber Essentials certificate is available to download from the University StaffNet, should staff or students need to refer to it. Our status is also available independently verified from the Cyber Essentials website.