About Apexward Assure

Why a certification body built a platform

Apexward Group is a Cyber Essentials certification body and an NCSC Assured Service Provider. That work put us in front of a lot of small suppliers, and the same thing kept happening: an organisation would pass an assessment, and then have no way to stay passed. The controls were real on the day. Six months later the evidence was stale, three new starters had never been added to the multi-factor policy, and nobody found out until the next assessment.

The tooling that solves this existed, but it was priced for organisations with a compliance function - per user, per framework, per control - which is precisely the organisations that did not have the problem. So we built the thing our certification customers were missing, and then decided not to charge for it.

Why we give it away

Hostile states, organised crime and hacktivist groups do not check your headcount before picking a target, and AI has made it considerably easier for people with malicious intent to reach their objective - to find the exposed thing, write the convincing message, and work at a speed that used to need a team. The threat has scaled. Most small suppliers’ defences have not.

British businesses of every size need access to the right tooling and to skilled people. A licence fee that puts basic visibility out of reach of the organisations with the least security budget helps nobody, so we removed it.

The platform gives you visibility of your own estate and the means to secure it. It also lets you extend that outwards: share it with your supply chain and you can see your suppliers’ controls actually being met, rather than trusting an annual questionnaire. A supply chain is only as strong as its smallest organisation, which is a reasonable argument for not charging that organisation.

The platform and the certification are separate

Apexward Assure is a platform: it runs your programme, gathers your evidence and watches your controls. It cannot certify you, and no platform can - certification is awarded by a certification body after an assessment. Apexward Group is a certification body, and an NCSC Assured Service Provider for Cyber Essentials, so the two can be handled together if you want that.

They are deliberately kept apart in practice. You are never required to certify with us to use the platform, and you do not have to run the platform to certify with us: plenty of Assure users certify elsewhere, and plenty of the organisations we certify have never opened Assure.

Who you contract with

Brand

Apexward Assure (StandAssured.com)

Legal entity

Apexward Group Ltd

Registered and operating address

Apexward Technology Ltd, Basepoint Business Centre, Caxton Close, Andover, Hampshire, SP10 3FG

Contact

hello@apexward.com · +44 (0) 330 190 0300

A note on the screenshots

Every product screenshot on this site shows a fictional company we built for the purpose. We would rather show the product working on invented data than publish a real customer’s security posture on a marketing site. The full disclosure is here.