Cyber Essentials Self-Check
The five control areas in plain English, the questions that most often fail a first submission, and what each one maps to in Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Entra ID, and Microsoft Defender.
The problem
Cyber Essentials is the certification your insurer, your customers, and your bids increasingly ask for by name, and the current papers ask harder questions than the ones people remember. Applications registered from 26 April 2026 use the Danzell question set alongside Requirements for IT Infrastructure v3.3, and two answers now fail the whole assessment on their own: a cloud service without multi-factor authentication where it is available, and high-risk or critical updates left longer than 14 days. Work through this before you register, not after - the certification date is usually attached to a contract or a renewal, and a resubmission costs you the date as well as the fee.
What's inside
- The five control areas in plain English, without the assessor's phrasing
- The two answers that now fail an assessment outright, whatever else is in place
- The Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Entra ID, and Microsoft Defender setting behind each control
- The scoping decisions that most often come apart at submission
Who it's for
- Teams with a certification or recertification date, or a customer contract that requires one
- IT and security leads on a Microsoft 365 estate preparing a first submission
- Anyone who certified before and wants to know what has changed since
Where this leads
Cyber Essentials Certification Pack
from £3,500 / $4,500
Work the checklist yourself first - it is yours to keep. If the gaps turn out to be more than an afternoon's work, this is the fixed-scope engagement that closes them against your date.
The First-Attempt Guarantee: a scoped control fails? We fix it and support your resubmission free.
Get the Cyber Essentials Self-Check
Free. We email it to you - a one-off, with no list to join unless you tick the optional box.
Get started
Find out where you stand, free
Most engagements start with a no-cost posture audit against the baselines that matter to you. If a fixed-fee roadmap is the right next step, we'll say so - and if it isn't, we'll say that too.