Cyber Essentials Plus (CE+) is a UK government-backed, independently assessed certification for cybersecurity. It provides a higher level of assurance than the standard scheme as it involves a hands-on technical assessment – including internal and external tests of the IT network – to verify an institution’s protection against common cyberattacks.
By gaining CE+ certification, organisations can demonstrate a strong commitment to data security, thereby assuring clients and partners that sensitive data is processed with high-security standards. It helps them meet regulatory requirements like GDPR. And, crucially, it enhances their resilience to threats and the costly damage that can result from cyberattacks.
Achieving compliance includes keeping all devices and software updated to mitigate vulnerabilities. For companies dependent on outdated but business-critical applications, however, this can be a challenge. That’s why our products are designed to keep these critical apps – such as Civica Keystone and other apps (Orchard, Capita One, etc) – running securely on modern platforms, without the need to rebuild or redevelop them.
In particular, Cloudhouse Alchemy helps teams to remove specific operating system (OS) dependencies like Silverlight from the host environment. However, this is where we hear a common concern around maintaining legacy apps and gaining CE+ compliance.
Clarifying CE+ concerns
While Silverlight as a standalone product is no longer supported, in Alchemy it isn’t installed or exposed on your device. It’s encapsulated purely as a dependency required by the application, accessible only within the self-contained Alchemy runtime and not by the wider operating system.
This has three key benefits:
- 1. No unsupported software is installed or registered on the host system
- 2. The host OS and browser remain fully patched and supported
- 3. Silverlight binaries are isolated and cannot be exploited independently
- In practice, these binaries function like application libraries (e.g. compression or encryption modules), and these libraries typically fall outside the scope of CE+, as the framework focuses on endpoint exposure and vulnerability.
Many of our UK public sector and financial customers have achieved and maintained CE+ certification while running apps packaged with Alchemy that include similar legacy runtimes.
So, if any of your internal systems still rely on outdated technologies, Cloudhouse Alchemy can help you:
- – Keep them fully functional on supported operating systems
- – Remove dependencies like Silverlight from the host environment
- – Avoid costly rewrites or disruptive migrations
– Cyber Essential Plus instils confidence in your cybersecurity – Cloudhouse Alchemy helps you to achieve and maintain CE+ certification. It’s quick to implement, risk-free, and backed by a money-back guarantee.
Speak to the team to find out more about how Cloudhouse can help.
