About ReadyCert
ReadyCert turns the Cyber Essentials questionnaire into plain questions about your business, tells you honestly what would fail today, shows you how to fix it, and drafts the paperwork. It is built for UK businesses of roughly five to fifty people with no IT department.
Why it exists
The Cyber Essentials questionnaire is written for assessors. It asks about “in-scope end-user devices” and “multi-factor authentication on cloud services” — perfectly clear if that's your job, and completely opaque if you run a plumbing firm and a client has just asked for a certificate.
So most small businesses do one of two things. They pay someone hundreds of pounds to translate it, or they guess, submit, and find out months later that one unanswered question failed the whole thing. Neither is a good use of anyone's week.
ReadyCert sits in between. It asks about your business in words you already use, maps every answer back to the official control, and tells you honestly what would fail today and exactly how to fix it. Then it drafts the paperwork. Certification itself stays where it belongs — with an IASME-licensed certification body.
What ReadyCert is — and isn't
ReadyCert is preparation software. It is not a certification body or an assessor, and it is not affiliated with IASME or the NCSC. Certification decisions are made by IASME-licensed certification bodies, and the assessment fee is paid to them, not to us. Nothing on this site or in the product is a guarantee that you will pass: it is preparation guidance, written to help you find and fix gaps before you pay for the assessment.
ReadyCert does not connect to your systems. You describe your own setup in your own words, and we store those descriptions — never your passwords, never access to your Microsoft, Google or other accounts.
How we keep it accurate
Every question ReadyCert asks maps to an official question number in the current IASME question set (“Danzell”, aligned to NCSC v3.3 and in force from April 2026), and every rule it applies is taken from the NCSC's Requirements for IT Infrastructure. The question set and its scoring rules are stored as data, not buried in code, so when the scheme changes each year the product changes with it rather than quietly going out of date. Where a question genuinely needs a human judgement — an internet-facing server, an unusual network — ReadyCert says so instead of pretending to know.
The guides on this site follow the same rule. Each one cites the official documents it is written from, carries the date it was last updated, and says “we don't know” where that is the honest answer.
Where to start
- What Cyber Essentials is, in plain English
- The free interactive checklist
- The free readiness check — about ten minutes, no card needed
Contact
One inbox for everything, including privacy requests: support@readycert.co.uk. Or use the contact page.