By Mark Ampleford, Managing Director, BSS

For those of you that don’t know, BSS was born four years ago. We are a risk and cyber solutions provider originally spawned from Barclay Simpson, known for its long history of delivering cyber security, governance, and data recruitment services. This foundation of providing bespoke teams to help CISOs and security leaders to solve their immediate and future information security challenges led to the need for so much more.

Today, BSS exists to solve a host of cyber and risk problems for organisations of all sizes. We work with large, highly regulated organisations who trust us to deliver against their ongoing cyber, risk, assurance, and compliance needs. We can also start with a blank canvas, helping you to reimagine your operational resilience and recovery.

Problem solved

We focus on engaging organisations with the best cyber security experts to help you overcome the complex and unique security and risk challenges your organisation faces.

We don’t just achieve this through the services we offer, such as auditing your current security state or delivering a full-scale risk management programme, but through connecting you with the right people. That’s why we build teams who are good listeners, real experts, and who just get on with it.

We’ve been dealing with the most challenging security and risk management scenarios for over 30 years and have an extensive network of trusted experts to draw from. But there is more to come.

Looking forward

BSS is always expanding. We aren’t a cyber security equivalent of a body shop; we want to be a full services solution and services company, helping our clients from start to finish and managing outcomes ourselves. To this end, we will keep scaling our offering.

My ultimate goal for the company is for us to become a full-service hybrid business, not placing cyber security experts into your organisation as permanent headcount, but instead sitting just on the outside – still a member of your team that you can rely on ­– but as a specialist you call upon on an associate basis.

Offering what our clients need

It goes without saying that every company needs a certain measure of confidence in its security features, practices, procedures, and architecture. But achieving this is not always simple, especially when internal teams are already stretched.

This is where our new Security-Assurance-as-a-Service comes in.

The Security-Assurance-as-a-Service offering is an elastic service for customers who need a more flexible approach to risk assurance. A certified cyber security expert will lead your risk assurance initiatives throughout the lifecycle, supported by additional consultants, where necessary, who focus on Project Assessment, Solutions Architecture and Third Party Risk Assurance.

We’ve also been taking on more and more tasks for our clients, meeting a large variety of cyber security needs across a range of industries.

For example, we’ve worked with big names in the financial services industry like Santander for which we developed, prepared, and deployed a fully realised cyber resilience solution to supplement and integrate with their existing processes. Read more in the case study here.

We’ve also worked with large global insurers helping one in particular manage a sharp increase in projects to review and engage with during a period of enhanced digitalisation and movement to the cloud. This is a service we can offer as a one-off, or a long-term commitment, as we did with the insurer in question, which you can read more about in our case study here.

The right people for the job

As I stated at the beginning of this blog, good cyber security is influenced by people just as much as technology, and that’s why we are really proud of the team we’ve built here at BSS.

Alongside our bench of associates, we have a permanent headcount of staff with the skills and expertise to help BSS and our customers grow and succeed.

Among the staff is Chris Wilkinson, our director, who brings with him a wealth of industry knowledge and connections. He has a particular focus on e-commerce retailers and lots of expertise dealing with the unique challenges mid-size companies face.

Solutions and services manager, Emily McMeeking, also brings a wealth of experience to the role having worked across both the private and public sector. This gives her great insight into how security landscapes can differ across industries, especially in highly regulated industries like financial services or the NHS.

Together Chris and Emily are working on building a virtual CISO service, further expanding the companies that BSS can help.

They are both supported by David Tyce, Programme Director, focussing on cyber recovery. You can read the first blog in his cyber recovery series here.

Please get in contact if we can assist you with any risk and cyber challenges you are facing today, and we’ll get stuck in!