RichardHam.co.uk Blog

Category: Security

Cybersecurity and infrastructure security

  • The M365 Security Baseline Most SMEs Skip

    The M365 Security Baseline Most SMEs Skip

    If your business runs on Microsoft 365 — and in the UK, that covers the vast majority of SMEs, law firms, and healthcare practices — there is a reasonable chance your tenant is less secure than you think.

    Not because Microsoft has failed. Not because your IT provider has been negligent. But because the default configuration of an M365 tenant is designed to get you up and running, not to protect a regulated business handling sensitive client data.

    Most organisations I work with assume that because Microsoft provides the platform, Microsoft secures it. That assumption is wrong, and it is the single most common gap I find when reviewing an SME’s security posture.

    The Shared Responsibility Model, Explained Simply

    Microsoft operates what is called a shared responsibility model. Microsoft secures the platform: the physical data centres, the hypervisor, the network infrastructure, the availability of the service. That part is genuinely well handled.

    What Microsoft does not do is secure your tenant. Your tenant is your configuration: who can log in, from where, with what level of verification. What happens to data when it leaves your mailbox. Who has access to your SharePoint sites. Whether a former contractor’s guest account is still active three years after they left.

    These are your decisions. Microsoft gives you the controls. It is up to you to turn them on and configure them correctly.

    The problem is that most SMEs never have this conversation. The tenant was set up when the business migrated to M365, the defaults were accepted, and no one with security expertise has reviewed the configuration since.

    The Seven Controls Most SMEs Skip

    When I conduct a baseline M365 security review, the same gaps appear with striking consistency. Here are the seven controls that are most commonly missing or misconfigured.

    1. MFA enforcement for all users. Multi-factor authentication is the single most effective control against credential-based attacks. It is also the one most likely to be partially deployed. I regularly find tenants where MFA is “enabled” but not “enforced” — a distinction that means users can still bypass it. Every account should have MFA enforced, without exception.

    2. Conditional access policies. MFA alone is not enough if it can be triggered from any device, on any network. Conditional access lets you require compliant devices, block legacy authentication, restrict access by location, and require step-up authentication for sensitive applications. Most SMEs I review have no conditional access policies configured at all.

    3. Mailbox auditing. M365 includes mailbox auditing as a standard feature, but it is not always enabled by default on older tenants. Without it, you have no record of who accessed a mailbox, what they did, and when. If a compromised account is used to exfiltrate email, you will not know. For law firms and healthcare organisations, this is a basic compliance requirement.

    4. DLP labels and policies. Data loss prevention lets you define sensitivity labels and apply policies that prevent data from leaving the organisation — for example, detecting when someone emails a document containing a National Insurance number or bank account detail to an external address. Most SMEs have no DLP policies. Those that do often run them in “test mode” that generates alerts but takes no action.

    5. Guest access controls. By default, M365 allows users to invite external guests to SharePoint sites, Teams channels, and shared folders. Without controls, a member of staff can share a folder containing sensitive client documents with an external address, and that access persists until someone manually revokes it. Guest access should be restricted by domain and subject to regular review.

    6. Retention policies. Without retention policies, everything stays in the tenant indefinitely — including data the business no longer needs, data it is not legally permitted to retain, and data that would be damaging in a breach or subject access request. Retention policies should reflect the organisation’s actual data retention schedule.

    7. Admin role hygiene. Global administrator grants full access to every service and every piece of data in the tenant. Most SMEs I review have between four and eight global administrators. The correct number is two or three, used exclusively for administration. Every additional global admin is an additional high-value target. Role-based access control should be used for everything else.

    Why This Matters: The Blast Radius of One Compromised Account

    The business risk here is not theoretical. A single compromised M365 account — obtained through phishing, credential stuffing, or a brute-force attack against an account without MFA — gives an attacker access to that user’s email, their OneDrive files, the SharePoint sites they can reach, the Teams channels they belong to, and every third-party application connected to the tenant.

    For a law firm, that could mean access to client matter files, privileged correspondence, and case strategy documents. For a healthcare practice, it could mean patient records and clinical communications. For any business, it could mean the ability to send convincing phishing emails from a trusted internal address to every contact in the organisation.

    The attacker does not need to breach your firewall. They do not need to exploit a vulnerability in your infrastructure. They need one set of credentials, and the default M365 configuration hands them the keys to everything.

    The Baseline Checklist

    If you want to assess where your organisation stands, here is a practical checklist. You can work through this with your IT team or your IT provider. Every item should be a yes or a concrete plan — not a “we think so” or “it should be on”.

    • [ ] MFA is enforced for every user account, without exceptions
    • [ ] Legacy authentication protocols are blocked via conditional access
    • [ ] Conditional access policies restrict access by device compliance and location
    • [ ] Mailbox auditing is enabled and logs are retained for at least 90 days
    • [ ] DLP policies are configured for sensitive data types and set to enforce, not just test
    • [ ] Guest access is restricted by domain and subject to regular access reviews
    • [ ] Retention policies are configured and aligned with the organisation’s data retention schedule
    • [ ] Global administrator roles are limited to two or three accounts, used only for administration
    • [ ] Role-based access control is used for all other administrative functions
    • [ ] A regular access review process is in place for both internal and external users

    If you can tick every box, your baseline is in good shape. If you cannot, you have a clear picture of where to start.

    Where to Start

    You do not need to fix everything at once. The highest-impact changes — MFA enforcement, blocking legacy authentication, and reducing global administrator count — can be implemented in a single afternoon and will meaningfully reduce your exposure.

    The rest can be prioritised based on your risk profile. A law firm handling privileged client data will prioritise DLP and mailbox auditing differently than a professional services firm with a smaller client base. The point is to make deliberate decisions about your configuration, not to accept the defaults and hope they are enough.

    If your organisation runs on M365 and you are not confident that your tenant is configured to a standard that would withstand scrutiny — from a regulator, a client, or an attacker — a structured security baseline review is the right first step. The Security & Compliance Strategy service covers M365 tenant configuration as part of the broader risk framework. Or get in touch for a 30-minute conversation about where your organisation stands.

  • What I Consistently Find in UK Law Firm M365 Tenants

    What I Consistently Find in UK Law Firm M365 Tenants

    UK law firms run on Microsoft 365. The corporate departments use it for document management, email, file sharing; the matters move through Outlook and SharePoint; the partners’ calendars sit in Exchange. It’s the central nervous system of the firm, and the threat model around it is well understood by attackers — authentic-fraud, business-email-compromise, and targeted credential theft are routine.

    What surprises me is how consistent the audit findings are. Different firms, different sizes, different IT suppliers — and largely the same gaps. None of these are exotic. All of them are fixable. But until someone with a structured eye looks at the tenant, they tend to stay where they are.

    This is the list I’ve assembled over enough M365 audits in the legal space to call it a pattern. If you run a UK law firm or sit on the management committee of one, this is what your auditor or your fractional CISO is going to find when they look.

    1. Legacy Authentication Still Works

    This is the most common single finding and the most consequential. Legacy authentication protocols — Basic Auth on Exchange, IMAP, POP3, SMTP AUTH — don’t support modern multi-factor authentication. If they’re enabled, an attacker who phishes a username and password can sign in as that user, full stop, with no MFA challenge.

    In law firms it usually persists because of an old line-of-business application: a dictation tool, a billing add-in, a niche practice-management integration. Somebody enabled the protocol years ago to make it work, and nobody has been paid to come back and turn it off.

    The fix is a Conditional Access policy that blocks legacy authentication across the board, with explicit and documented exceptions for any application that genuinely still needs it. In most firms the exception list ends up being zero or one applications. Microsoft has been actively retiring these protocols for years, and there’s almost nothing legitimate left that requires them.

    2. Conditional Access Is Either Absent or Performative

    Most firms have MFA enabled. Far fewer have it enforced through Conditional Access policies that actually constrain where and how people can sign in.

    Common patterns:

    • MFA enforced for users but not for global administrators (because admins find it inconvenient)
    • No location-based restrictions, so an attacker in Russia or Vietnam can hit the sign-in page directly
    • No device compliance requirements, so any unmanaged device can authenticate
    • Mobile email access without app protection policies, so a lost or sold phone is an unmanaged data egress

    A defensible Conditional Access posture means: every user, every admin, every privileged account, with location and device controls appropriate to the role. It takes a structured deployment but it’s not technically complex, and the security delta is significant.

    3. Mail Flow Authentication Is Incomplete

    Almost every law firm I audit has SPF set up. Some have DKIM. Very few have DMARC at enforcement (p=reject or p=quarantine with a meaningful percentage).

    The gap matters because of how legal email is targeted. Authentic-fraud — where an attacker sends a fake invoice from a supplier address, or a fake completion-funds instruction from a counterparty — relies on being able to spoof the sending domain. Without DMARC at enforcement, your domain can be spoofed. With DMARC at enforcement, it can’t.

    DMARC is a journey, not a switch. You need to start at p=none, gather reports, identify legitimate senders that need configuring, fix them, and then move stepwise to p=quarantine and eventually p=reject. It typically takes six to ten weeks of attention, but the protection it produces — for clients, for counterparties, and for the firm’s reputation — is worth far more than the work.

    4. Admin Rights Are Vastly Over-Distributed

    The principle of least privilege says that admin rights should be the smallest possible set, granted to the smallest possible group, for the shortest possible time. The reality in most firms is the opposite. The IT manager is a global admin. So is their deputy. So are two engineers at the MSP. So is the partner who set up the original tenant. So is the consultant who came in to fix the email migration in 2019.

    When I audit, I routinely find five or six accounts with global admin privileges. Often more. Each of those accounts is a high-value target — phishing one of them gets the attacker the keys to the entire estate.

    The corrective work is straightforward but politically delicate. You need to:

    • Inventory every account with privileged roles
    • Remove anyone who doesn’t need the role on a daily basis
    • Move the rest to Privileged Identity Management (PIM) so they hold the role only when they need it
    • Separate normal-user accounts from admin accounts (so phishing the user account doesn’t compromise admin)
    • Require MFA and Conditional Access on the admin accounts at a higher bar than normal users

    This is one of the most impactful changes a firm can make. It takes weeks, not months. And it dramatically reduces the blast radius of any compromise.

    5. Audit Logging Is Often Misconfigured

    The unified audit log in M365 is invaluable when something has happened — a suspicious sign-in, a mass file download, a new mail forwarding rule on a partner’s account. But it has to be enabled, with retention long enough to be useful, and reviewed against alerts that catch the things you actually care about.

    In many tenants I find:

    • Unified audit logging never enabled, or enabled for only some workloads
    • Retention set to the licensing default of 90 days when an investigation might need to go back a year
    • No alerts configured for high-risk events (impossible-travel sign-ins, mass downloads, mailbox forwarding rules, OAuth grants to suspicious applications)

    For a firm of any size, the log is your evidence base when you need to demonstrate to clients, insurers, or the SRA that you’ve understood and responded to an incident. Without it, you have stories. With it, you have evidence.

    The configuration takes an afternoon. The alert tuning takes longer — but that’s where the value is.

    6. SharePoint Permissions Are a Mess

    This is the finding most law firms underestimate. SharePoint Online underpins the document store; in many firms it’s the de-facto matter file system, often with a document management overlay on top. Permissions in SharePoint are notoriously easy to set up incorrectly and notoriously hard to audit afterwards.

    Common findings:

    • Sites where “Everyone except external users” has read or edit access — meaning every employee can see every matter
    • Documents shared via “anyone with the link” with no expiry, where the link has been forwarded around
    • Guest access enabled on sites that should be internal-only
    • Inherited permissions broken in places that nobody documented
    • Former employees still appearing in permission groups long after their accounts were disabled

    The corrective work is unglamorous: a structured permissions review, retirement of broad-access shares, replacement of “anyone with the link” sharing with proper guest access, and access reviews scheduled into the calendar. It’s an ongoing discipline, not a one-off project. But the principle is non-negotiable for a law firm — confidentiality obligations don’t allow for a permissions model where anyone can see anything.

    What This Adds Up To

    None of these findings are exotic. None of them require expensive tooling beyond what’s already in your M365 licensing. What they require is somebody with a structured eye to look at the tenant, identify the gaps, and have the institutional weight to actually drive the corrective work to completion.

    That’s almost always the gap. The IT manager or the MSP knows about most of these issues — they live with the symptoms — but they don’t have the time, the seniority, or the air-cover to push through the work. A fractional CISO engagement gives you that. A structured audit gives you the prioritised list.

    If you run a UK firm, the question worth answering this quarter is: when did somebody actually look at the tenant? If the answer is more than a year ago or never, this is the work that pays back fastest.

    If you’d like a structured M365 audit for your firm, the work sits inside the Security & Compliance Strategy service, and the legal-sector page covers how I scope this for law firms specifically. Or just get in touch for a 30-minute conversation about where your tenant stands.

  • What a Cyber Essentials Plus Audit Actually Involves

    What a Cyber Essentials Plus Audit Actually Involves

    What a Cyber Essentials Plus Audit Actually Involves
    Published: April 8, 2026

    Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus are often mentioned in the same breath, but they’re meaningfully different certifications. Cyber Essentials is self-assessed — you answer a questionnaire about your controls and a certification body reviews your answers. Cyber Essentials Plus involves an auditor actually testing whether your controls work.

    If you’re being asked to achieve CE Plus — by a public sector client, a large enterprise in your supply chain, or your cyber insurance provider — it helps to know what you’re walking into.

    The Five Technical Controls

    Both certifications are built around the same five technical control areas. Cyber Essentials Plus tests all five through active assessment:

    1. Firewalls — boundary firewalls and internet gateways are configured to block unauthorised access
    2. Secure configuration — devices and software are configured securely, unnecessary services removed
    3. User access control — user accounts are managed, access is limited to what’s needed, admin rights are controlled
    4. Malware protection — protection against malicious software on devices
    5. Patch management — operating systems and software are up to date and vulnerabilities are patched promptly

    The assessment tests these controls against your actual devices and environment. It’s not a paper exercise.

    What the Assessment Actually Looks Like

    The assessment is conducted remotely in the vast majority of cases, using a combination of automated scanning tools and manual verification. The auditor will need access to representative sample devices across your environment — typically a mix of Windows, macOS, and mobile if applicable — as well as access to your network boundary.

    External vulnerability scan — the assessor scans your internet-facing infrastructure for open ports, accessible services, and known vulnerabilities. Anything exposed that shouldn’t be is a finding.

    Internal device sampling — the assessor will check a sample of user devices. They’re looking at: is the OS up to date, are software patches current, is malware protection active and updated, are there unnecessary admin rights on user accounts, is the device configured securely (screensaver lock, auto-update, no unnecessary services).

    User account review — they’ll look at your Active Directory or Entra ID (Azure AD) to check for unused accounts, accounts with unnecessary admin privileges, and whether your admin accounts are separate from day-to-day user accounts.

    Browser configuration — browsers are specifically assessed. Extensions, default security settings, and whether browser-based malware protection is active.

    The whole process typically takes half a day to a day depending on the size of your environment.

    Where Businesses Fail

    Having supported a number of UK businesses through CE Plus, the failure points are consistent:

    Patching lag on end-user devices. The standard requires that high and critical vulnerabilities are patched within 14 days of a patch being released. Most businesses aren’t meeting this. Laptops that are rarely connected to the corporate network, personal devices used for work, and machines that haven’t been restarted in months are the typical culprits.

    Admin rights on standard user accounts. This is extremely common. Users who were given admin rights to install something three years ago and still have them. Sometimes it’s the entire organisation because “it was just easier”. CE Plus will fail on this.

    Unsupported software. An application that hasn’t received a security update in over a year, or is running on an end-of-life OS version, is a straight failure. This catches people out when they have legacy line-of-business software that the vendor no longer patches.

    Scope creep surprises. Businesses sometimes underestimate what’s in scope. If a personal mobile phone is used to access company email or data, it’s in scope. If a contractor’s laptop connects to your network, it may be in scope. Agreeing the scope boundary clearly before assessment avoids surprises.

    External exposure they didn’t know about. Open ports, misconfigured cloud services, old VPN endpoints — the external scan sometimes surfaces things the business genuinely didn’t know were there.

    How to Prepare

    If you’re planning to pursue CE Plus, give yourself at least six to eight weeks of preparation time — more if you know patching or access control is in a poor state.

    Start with a self-assessment against the Cyber Essentials requirements document. Work through each of the five controls honestly. Where you can’t answer yes confidently, that’s where you need to focus.

    Fix patching first. This is the most common failure point and the one that takes the longest to fix systematically. You need a repeatable process, not a one-off catch-up before the audit.

    Audit your admin rights. Pull a full list of accounts with local admin or domain admin privileges. Anything that isn’t explicitly needed and documented should be removed before the assessment.

    Check your software inventory. Identify anything running on an unsupported version. Either update it, replace it, or make a decision about scope exclusion (with appropriate compensating controls).

    Agree scope in writing before the assessment starts. Be explicit about what’s included: which devices, which network segments, which cloud services.

    Is It Worth It?

    Aside from the contractual requirements — and CE Plus is increasingly required for UK government supply chain and some financial services clients — the process is genuinely useful. Going through it forces a structured review of controls that most businesses have never done systematically.

    The businesses I’ve seen come through it well are the ones that treated preparation as an IT improvement project, not a box-ticking exercise. The ones that struggle are the ones that try to do the minimum to pass rather than fixing the underlying issues.

    If you need support preparing for Cyber Essentials Plus, I offer a structured readiness assessment that works through all five control areas and produces a prioritised remediation list before you engage a certification body. It sits inside the Security & Compliance Strategy service.

    Get in touch to discuss CE Plus preparation.

  • 2026 AI Threats for UK SMEs: What’s Actually Changed

    2026 AI Threats for UK SMEs: What’s Actually Changed

    2026 AI Threats for UK SMEs: What’s Actually Changed
    Published: April 1, 2026

    Every year brings a new round of threat reports telling SMEs that cyber risk is increasing. That’s been true for twenty years. What’s different in 2026 is that AI has genuinely changed the threat landscape — not just the scale of attacks, but the nature of them. The traditional advice still applies, but it’s no longer sufficient on its own.

    Here’s what I’m seeing, and what UK SMEs actually need to be thinking about.

    Phishing Has Crossed a Quality Threshold

    For years, phishing emails were easy to spot if you knew what to look for: odd phrasing, generic greetings, suspicious sender domains, poorly formatted logos. Staff training focused on these signals, and it worked reasonably well.

    AI-generated phishing has removed most of those signals. Emails are now grammatically perfect, contextually appropriate, and personalised using data scraped from LinkedIn, company websites, and previous data breaches. I’ve seen examples targeting UK SME directors that reference their specific clients, their recent hires, and their company structure — all publicly available, all assembled automatically at scale.

    The implication isn’t that training is useless. It’s that training needs to evolve. Spotting typos is no longer the point. The question to train staff on is: was I expecting this request? Does this ask me to do something — click, pay, approve, share credentials — and if so, have I verified it through a separate channel?

    Deepfake Audio and Video Are Becoming Operational

    This was theoretical eighteen months ago. It’s operational now. UK businesses have experienced losses from voice-cloned fraud — attackers using AI-generated audio of a senior person in the business to instruct a finance team member to make a payment.

    The attack is effective because it bypasses the email security controls most businesses have invested in. It’s a phone call. It sounds like the CFO. It says there’s an urgent payment that needs to go today.

    The defence is procedural, not technical: any payment instruction, regardless of how it arrives or who it appears to be from, above a threshold amount requires verification via a pre-agreed method. That policy needs to be written, communicated, and tested.

    Shadow AI Is Creating Data Exposure You Don’t Know About

    Your staff are using AI tools. If you haven’t explicitly told them which tools are approved and what data they can put into them, they’re making those decisions themselves — and the decisions aren’t always good ones.

    I’ve spoken to business owners who didn’t know their team had been pasting client contracts into ChatGPT to summarise them, or putting commercially sensitive proposals into AI writing tools, or using consumer AI assistants for analysis that contains personal data. None of it was malicious. None of it was authorised either.

    The fix isn’t to ban AI — that’s both impractical and counterproductive. The fix is a clear AI use policy: which tools are approved, what data categories can be used with each, and what’s prohibited. It doesn’t need to be long. It needs to exist.

    Automated Vulnerability Exploitation Has Accelerated

    AI tools have significantly reduced the time between a vulnerability being disclosed and active exploitation in the wild. The window between a patch being released and attackers using the underlying vulnerability against unpatched systems is now measured in hours in some cases, not weeks.

    For SMEs running on-premise infrastructure or self-managed cloud services, this puts a new premium on patching speed. Monthly patching cycles — which were never ideal — are now genuinely inadequate for critical vulnerabilities. Critical patches need a 24–72 hour response window as a minimum.

    If you’re running an MSP or internal IT team, this is worth an explicit conversation: what is your current patching SLA for critical CVEs, and can you demonstrate that it’s being met?

    Prompt Injection Is a Real Risk If You’re Using AI in Your Workflows

    This one is less widely understood but increasingly relevant for businesses that have started integrating AI into their operations — customer-facing chatbots, AI-assisted document processing, automated workflows.

    Prompt injection is an attack where malicious instructions are hidden in content that an AI system processes — a document, an email, a form submission — and those instructions cause the AI to behave in unintended ways. In a customer service chatbot, that might mean the AI leaks internal information or gives incorrect advice. In an AI-assisted finance workflow, the implications can be more serious.

    If you’re deploying AI in any operational context, your vendor or developer needs to demonstrate they’ve thought about this. It should be on your checklist when evaluating any AI-powered tool.

    What This Means in Practice

    None of this requires a large security budget. It requires clear thinking about where your exposure is and proportionate controls.

    For most UK SMEs in 2026, the immediate priorities are:

    1. Update your phishing awareness training to reflect AI-generated threats — not just “spot the typo”
    2. Implement a payment verification policy that can’t be bypassed by a convincing phone call
    3. Publish an AI use policy before something goes wrong
    4. Review your patching SLA for critical vulnerabilities with your IT team or MSP
    5. If you’re using AI in any operational workflow, get a basic security review of how it’s been deployed

    If you’re not sure where to start, a Discovery Audit will give you a prioritised picture of your current exposure across all of these areas. The AI-specific side of this — governance, threat modelling, and safe deployment — sits in the AI & Automation Architecture service.

    Book a call to discuss your security position.

  • Your M365 Tenant Has More Exposure Than You Think

    Your M365 Tenant Has More Exposure Than You Think

    Your M365 Tenant Has More Exposure Than You Think
    Published: March 24, 2026

    Most small and mid-sized businesses running Microsoft 365 believe they’re reasonably well protected. They’re paying for the licences, they’ve got MFA turned on (probably), and their IT provider or MSP set it all up. What more is there to do?

    Quite a lot, as it turns out. When I audit an M365 tenant — and I’ve audited more than I can count — I consistently find the same set of misconfigurations and over-permissions. Not because anyone did anything wrong, but because the defaults Microsoft ships aren’t designed for your security posture. They’re designed for onboarding speed.

    Here’s what I typically find.

    Legacy Authentication Is Still Enabled

    This is the single most common finding, and it’s the one that matters most. Legacy authentication protocols — Basic Auth, SMTP AUTH, IMAP, POP3 — don’t support modern multi-factor authentication. If they’re enabled, an attacker who gets hold of a username and password can authenticate without needing to pass MFA at all.

    Microsoft has been moving to block legacy auth for years, but many tenants still have it partially or fully enabled — often because someone needed it for an old application or printer, and nobody ever turned it off again.

    The fix is to create Conditional Access policies that block legacy authentication across the board, with explicit exceptions only where you have a genuine and documented business need.

    Too Many Global Admins

    Almost every tenant I audit has more Global Administrators than it should. In some cases I’ve seen five or six people with Global Admin — in a company of 40 people.

    Global Admin is the highest privilege level in a Microsoft 365 tenant. Anyone with it can create accounts, access all data, modify security settings, and disable MFA. It should be used sparingly, with dedicated admin accounts (not day-to-day user accounts), and protected with phishing-resistant MFA.

    The principle of least privilege applies here. Most people who are Global Admins don’t need to be. Exchange Administrator, User Administrator, and Security Reader roles cover 90% of what people actually need to do.

    MFA Is On, But Not Enforced Everywhere

    MFA adoption in SMEs has improved significantly. But “MFA is enabled” and “MFA is enforced” are different things.

    In many tenants, MFA is configured via the legacy Per-User MFA panel rather than Conditional Access. This approach has gaps — it doesn’t cover service accounts, doesn’t handle different risk levels, and gives users the option to skip registration. I’ve seen tenants where MFA is “enabled” for all users but 20% of them have never actually registered a method.

    Conditional Access gives you proper control: require MFA for all users, all apps, with no exceptions except explicit break-glass accounts. If you’re on Microsoft 365 Business Premium, you have the licences for it. Most businesses aren’t using them properly.

    External Sharing Is Wide Open

    SharePoint and OneDrive external sharing defaults are permissive. In a default or lightly configured tenant, users can share files externally with anyone, with no expiry, no notification to IT, and no audit trail in a place anyone looks at.

    I’ve found tenants where sensitive commercial documents — contracts, financials, client data — had been shared externally via “anyone with the link” and had been sitting that way for two or three years. Nobody knew.

    The fix is to review and restrict your SharePoint sharing settings at tenant level, enable sharing expiry for external links, and configure alerts for broad external sharing events.

    Email Security Is Incomplete

    SPF is usually configured — it’s been standard practice for long enough that most tenants have it. DKIM and DMARC are a different story.

    Without DKIM signing, emails from your domain can be spoofed with a reasonable success rate. Without a DMARC policy at enforcement (p=reject or p=quarantine), you have no mechanism to prevent or monitor spoofing of your domain. Most tenants I audit have DMARC either missing entirely, or set to p=none — monitoring only, no protection.

    For a business of any size, a properly configured email authentication stack (SPF + DKIM + DMARC at enforcement) is non-negotiable. It’s not complex to implement, and the protection it provides against phishing and impersonation is significant.

    Audit Logging Isn’t Turned On Properly

    M365 has a unified audit log that captures sign-in events, admin actions, file access, mail forwarding rules, and much more. It’s invaluable when you’re investigating an incident — or trying to demonstrate compliance.

    In many tenants it’s not enabled, or it’s enabled but the retention period is set to 90 days (the default for most licence types). If you need to investigate something that happened four months ago, that’s a problem.

    Check that unified audit logging is enabled, review your retention settings, and make sure you have alerts configured for high-risk events: impossible travel sign-ins, mass download events, new mail forwarding rules.

    What to Do With This

    None of this is exotic. These are all configurations within the Microsoft 365 Admin Center and the Security portal — no additional tooling required. But they take time to work through properly, and they require someone who knows what they’re looking at.

    If you want to know exactly where your tenant stands, I run a structured M365 security audit that covers all of the above and more, with a prioritised findings report. It typically takes half a day and gives you a clear picture of your exposure. It sits inside the broader Security & Compliance Strategy service.

    Get in touch to discuss an M365 audit for your business.

  • What is a Fractional CISO?

    What is a Fractional CISO?

    What is a Fractional CISO?
    Published: March 17, 2026

    If you’ve started looking at your cyber risk and realised you need someone senior in the room — but a full-time CISO at £120,000–£180,000 a year isn’t on the cards — a Fractional CISO is probably what you’re looking for.

    The term gets used loosely. Let me give you a straight answer about what it actually means, what a Fractional CISO does day-to-day, and how to tell whether you need one.

    The Short Version

    A Fractional CISO is a senior security leader who works with your organisation on a part-time or interim basis — typically one to three days a week, often on a fixed-term engagement. You get the strategic judgement and hands-on experience of someone who has run security at enterprise level, without hiring them full-time.

    The “fractional” model exists because most SMEs and growing businesses don’t need a full-time CISO. What they need is serious security leadership a few days a week — someone who can set the direction, own the risk, talk to the board, and make sure the technical team is pointed the right way.

    What a Fractional CISO Actually Does

    This varies by engagement, but in practice the work falls into a few consistent areas:

    Security strategy and governance — defining your security posture, setting policy, building a roadmap that’s proportionate to your risk and your budget. Not a 200-page document nobody reads. A working plan the business can execute.

    Risk and compliance — owning your risk register, preparing for Cyber Essentials or Cyber Essentials Plus, supporting ISO 27001 if that’s relevant, making sure you’re meeting your contractual and regulatory obligations. For many UK businesses this increasingly means GDPR accountability as well.

    Incident readiness — making sure you have a plan before something goes wrong, not after. Running tabletop exercises, reviewing your backup and recovery position, knowing who calls who at 2am.

    Board and leadership communication — translating technical risk into business language. A board doesn’t need to understand CVE scores. They need to understand what they’re liable for and what it would cost if something went wrong. That’s a skill most technical security people don’t have, and it’s where a good CISO earns their fee.

    Vendor and supplier oversight — reviewing what your MSP is actually doing, checking your cloud configuration, making sure the security tooling you’re paying for is configured correctly. In my experience, most SMEs have the right tools and the wrong settings.

    What a Fractional CISO Is Not

    They’re not a one-off consultant who delivers a report and disappears. That’s a security audit. Useful, but different.

    They’re not a managed security service (MSSP). An MSSP monitors your environment and responds to alerts. A Fractional CISO sets the strategy that determines what you’re monitoring and why.

    They’re not a replacement for a good IT team or MSP. They work alongside your existing technical resource, not instead of it.

    Who Needs a Fractional CISO?

    The businesses I typically work with fit one of a few patterns:

    • Growing SMEs (50–500 people) who have outgrown “IT does security” but aren’t ready to hire a full-time CISO. Often triggered by a new enterprise customer asking about your security posture, or a cyber insurance renewal that suddenly requires evidence.
    • PE-backed portfolio companies where the fund needs consistent security governance across multiple portfolio businesses. One fractional CISO across two or three companies is far more cost-effective than three separate hires.
    • Businesses going through change — acquisition, cloud migration, rapid headcount growth. Security debt accumulates fast in these moments. A fractional engagement through the transition prevents problems that are very expensive to fix later.
    • Businesses post-incident who need someone to come in, stabilise, and build something better. This is the most urgent version of the engagement and usually the most intensive.

    What It Costs

    Engagement structures vary, but a typical fractional CISO arrangement in the UK runs between £3,000 and £8,000 per month depending on days committed and scope. Compare that to the fully-loaded cost of a permanent hire — salary, NI, benefits, pension, recruitment fees — and the economics are usually straightforward.

    For most SMEs, the right entry point is a Discovery Audit: a structured review of your current security posture that produces a prioritised roadmap. It gives you a clear picture of where you stand and what to fix first, and it’s the starting point for any ongoing engagement.

    The Question Worth Asking

    Most businesses don’t call a Fractional CISO until something prompts them — a near-miss, a contract requirement, a board conversation. The ones that get the most value engage before that moment, when there’s time to build something properly rather than fix something broken.

    If you’re not sure whether your business is in a good position, the honest answer is: you probably don’t know, and that’s worth finding out. The way I structure this work is described on the Security & Compliance Strategy service page.

    Book a 30-minute call to talk through your situation — no pitch, just a frank conversation.

  • Does Your Business Actually Need a CISO? An Honest Answer

    Does Your Business Actually Need a CISO? An Honest Answer

    Most of the businesses I talk to ask this question after something has already happened. A contract requirement they didn’t see coming. An insurance renewal that suddenly needs evidence. A near-miss with a phishing attack. A new board member who used to work somewhere with proper security governance.

    The honest answer to “do I need a CISO?” depends on where your business is and what’s about to happen to it. Here’s how to think through it.

    Five Signals You Need One

    1. An enterprise customer is asking about your security posture

    If you’re selling into large organisations — financial services, healthcare, legal, retail, public sector — their procurement and vendor management processes now routinely require you to complete security questionnaires, pass supplier audits, or meet minimum security standards.

    “We take security very seriously” is not an answer to a SOC 2 questionnaire or a CREST assessment. If your current position is that your IT manager handles security alongside everything else, you’re going to start losing contracts to competitors who can demonstrate proper governance.

    A CISO — even fractional — gives you someone who can own this, respond credibly, and make sure your controls match what you’re saying they are.

    2. You’re going through or approaching a transaction

    M&A, PE investment, fundraising, management buyout — any significant transaction will involve a technology and security due diligence process. Buyers and investors are looking for clean estates, documented controls, and evidence of risk awareness.

    Discovering your security gaps during due diligence is expensive. You either fix them under time pressure (costly), accept a price reduction (painful), or watch the deal fall through (devastating). Engaging a CISO before you reach that stage gives you time to find and address the issues on your own terms.

    3. You’re growing faster than your controls

    Headcount doubling. New offices. First international employees. Acquisitions of smaller businesses with their own IT environments. Cloud adoption running ahead of policy.

    Security debt accumulates faster than almost any other kind of technical debt, and it’s less visible until it isn’t. If your organisation has outrun its original IT setup, you almost certainly have gaps that haven’t been properly assessed.

    4. Compliance is becoming unavoidable

    ISO 27001 is now effectively table stakes for mid-market UK businesses selling B2B. Cyber Essentials Plus is increasingly mandated for government supply chain work. GDPR accountability isn’t going away.

    These programmes can be done without a CISO, but they’re more expensive and less effective when they’re treated as a project rather than an embedded practice. A CISO makes compliance a sustainable capability, not a recurring one-off cost.

    5. You’ve had an incident — or you’ve nearly had one

    A ransomware infection that got contained by luck. A staff member who clicked a phishing link and you only found out weeks later. A data breach notification from a supplier. A security researcher who contacted you about an exposed database.

    Near-misses are warnings. They tell you that something in your environment is porous. Responding well to an incident — containing it, understanding the root cause, communicating appropriately, and improving controls — requires someone with the right experience in the room.

    Three Signals You Don’t Need One Yet

    1. You’re genuinely too small

    If you’re under 20 people, cloud-native, with no regulated data and no enterprise customer requirements, a full CISO engagement is probably not the right tool. What you need is a well-configured Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace environment, Cyber Essentials certification, and a sensible backup and recovery position. That’s a project, not an ongoing leadership role.

    2. Your existing IT partner is doing an adequate job

    Some MSPs and IT providers genuinely include good security oversight in their service delivery. If your provider is actively managing patching, monitoring your environment, advising on configuration, and doing periodic risk reviews — and if you have no external compliance pressures — you may not need a separate CISO function yet.

    The test: can you say what your current security posture is? Can you name the three biggest risks to your business and what’s being done about them? If yes, you may be fine. If not, that’s a gap.

    3. You’re not ready for the conversation

    A CISO engagement only works if the business is willing to make decisions and act on the findings. If your leadership team isn’t prepared to invest in the recommendations, change some established habits, or have difficult conversations with suppliers or staff — the engagement won’t deliver value.

    This isn’t a reason to delay indefinitely. It is a reason to make sure the business is aligned before starting.

    What Most UK SMEs Actually Need

    The reality is that most UK businesses between 50 and 300 people sit in a middle ground. They have genuine security risk, real compliance exposure, and meaningful consequences if something goes wrong — but the workload doesn’t justify a full-time hire.

    What they typically need is:

    • Someone accountable for security at a senior level (not just “IT handles it”)
    • A clear picture of their current posture and the gaps
    • A proportionate roadmap — not a 200-page security programme, but the 10 things that matter most
    • Ongoing oversight to make sure progress happens and new risks are caught

    That’s what a Fractional CISO engagement is designed to deliver. Two days a month might sound minimal, but two days a month of focused senior security leadership is more valuable than fifty days of security-adjacent IT management.

    The entry point for most businesses I work with is a Discovery Audit — a structured two-to-three day review that gives you a clear picture of where you stand and what to prioritise. No commitment to an ongoing engagement. Just a straight answer.

    If you’re trying to decide whether your business needs a CISO and aren’t sure where you sit, get in touch. I’ll tell you honestly whether I can help and what the right starting point is. Most conversations are useful even when there’s no engagement at the end. The full scope of how I work is on the Security & Compliance Strategy service page.

  • What Does a Fractional CISO Cost in the UK? (2026 Guide)

    What Does a Fractional CISO Cost in the UK? (2026 Guide)

    If you’ve started looking into fractional CISO arrangements, you’ve probably noticed that nobody publishes rates. You get vague talk about “competitive pricing” and “tailored engagements” but no actual numbers.

    This is my attempt to fix that. I’ll give you the real ranges, explain what moves the price, and give you the comparison you actually need: fractional versus a permanent hire.

    What You’re Actually Buying

    Before we get to numbers, it’s worth being clear about what a Fractional CISO engagement actually covers — because the answer affects the cost.

    A Fractional CISO is not a security consultant who writes reports. That’s a different engagement model. A Fractional CISO is a part-time member of your senior leadership, operating as your de facto Chief Information Security Officer with all the accountability that implies.

    In practice, that means:

    Ownership of your security posture. Not advice about it. Actual ownership — setting strategy, making decisions, reporting to the board or CEO on risk.

    Ongoing availability. Not just fixed project days. A good Fractional CISO is reachable when something happens — a supplier breach, an insurance questionnaire, a board request for a risk briefing.

    Day-to-day security leadership. Reviewing controls, managing incidents, overseeing your IT team or MSP on security matters, making sure the work actually gets done.

    External credibility. Being able to put a named CISO on a client questionnaire, a contract, or an audit scope. For mid-market businesses dealing with enterprise customers, this alone is often worth the fee.

    That distinction matters because it separates fractional from project-based work, and the price reflects it.

    Typical Cost Ranges in the UK Market

    Here are the real numbers as of 2026, based on the UK market specifically:

    Entry-level engagement: £2,500–£4,000/month
    Usually one day a week, or a structured retainer. Covers governance, policy, and light-touch oversight. Right for smaller businesses (20–80 people) who need a documented security posture and someone accountable for it, but don’t have complex infrastructure or active compliance requirements.

    Mid-range engagement: £4,000–£7,000/month
    One to two days a week. This is the most common arrangement for UK SMEs between 80 and 300 people. Covers strategy, compliance (Cyber Essentials Plus, ISO 27001 readiness, GDPR accountability), board reporting, incident management, and oversight of your technical security team or MSP.

    Higher-intensity engagement: £7,000–£12,000/month
    Two to three days per week, or a fixed-scope intensive engagement (post-incident stabilisation, pre-acquisition security readiness, major compliance programme). At this level you’re getting something close to a full-time CISO presence without the full-time cost.

    Some providers price by day rate rather than monthly retainer. In that case, expect senior Fractional CISO day rates in the UK to sit between £900 and £1,800 per day, depending on experience and specialism.

    What Affects the Price

    The same fractional CISO will charge differently for different engagements. Here’s what moves the number:

    Days committed per month. The main variable. More days, more cost — but also more hands-on delivery versus purely strategic oversight.

    Compliance scope. If you’re pursuing ISO 27001, preparing for a major enterprise audit, or navigating sector-specific requirements (financial services, healthcare, defence supply chain), the workload increases substantially. Expect to pay for it.

    Incident history. Starting from scratch is easier than cleaning up after a breach or a failed audit. Post-incident engagements are more intensive and more expensive in the early months.

    Organisation complexity. 50 people in one office with a single cloud environment is a different engagement to 200 people across four countries with a mix of legacy systems, SaaS, and on-premise infrastructure.

    Urgency. A phased 12-month engagement costs less per month than a 90-day sprint to get you through a due diligence process. You pay for speed.

    Fractional vs Full-Time: The Real Comparison

    A permanent CISO in the UK costs, on a fully-loaded basis:

    • Base salary: £90,000–£160,000 (senior hire in London; less outside)
    • Employer NI: ~13.8% on salary
    • Pension contributions: typically 5–8%
    • Benefits package: private health, life assurance, income protection
    • Recruitment fees: typically 20–25% of first-year salary if using an agency

    Add it up and a full-time CISO typically costs £130,000–£220,000 per year all-in before you’ve counted their office space, equipment, management overhead, or the time it takes to find the right person.

    A mid-range fractional engagement at £5,000/month is £60,000 per year. You get senior-level security leadership at roughly half the cost, with no recruitment risk, no notice period to serve, and the ability to scale the days up or down as your needs change.

    For most UK SMEs, the only reason not to go fractional is if your security workload genuinely justifies full-time attention — and that usually means you’re above 500 people with a complex regulatory environment, active threat landscape, or significant security-critical product development.

    The Starting Point: A Discovery Audit

    For most businesses, the right first engagement isn’t a retainer. It’s a Discovery Audit: a structured review of your current security posture that takes two to three days and produces a prioritised action plan.

    It answers the question: where do we actually stand? It removes the uncertainty from any ongoing engagement that follows, and it’s the honest way to scope a fractional arrangement — you don’t know what you’re buying until you know what the problems are.

    If you’re comparing providers, ask whether they’ll do a discovery engagement before committing to a retainer. If the answer is no, that’s a signal.

    If you’d like to talk through what a fractional CISO engagement might look like for your business — scope, cost, timeline — see the Security & Compliance Strategy service or get in touch directly. I’ll give you a straight answer about whether it makes sense.

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