Insights

Awareness Insights

Articles on awareness: practical cyber security and technology leadership insights for UK SMEs, written by James Griffiths.

Why External Third-Party Audits Are Worth Every Penny
Awareness

Why External Third-Party Audits Are Worth Every Penny

There is a tempting logic in the idea of assessing your own security posture. Your internal team knows the environment, understands the history of decisions made, and can move quickly without the overhead of onboarding an outside party. So why bring in someone from outside? Why pay for the privilege

1 June 2026
AI Is Not the Biggest Cyber Risk. Poor Identity Controls Are.
AI

AI Is Not the Biggest Cyber Risk. Poor Identity Controls Are.

AI is not breaking cybersecurity. Weak identity controls are. AI just makes the consequences faster, cheaper, and harder to ignore. Right now, too many security strategies are being reshaped around AI threats while the same organisations still run fragile identity and access management systems. This

20 January 2026
SEO Is Dead. Long Live AI Search Optimisation.
AI

SEO Is Dead. Long Live AI Search Optimisation.

For 20 years, SEO meant one thing. Rank on Google. Win clicks. Tune keywords. Build backlinks. That model is breaking. Search is moving from links to answers. Users now ask Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity questions and expect a single, confident response. Often with no click at all. If your

17 December 2025
The Problem With “AI Startups” That Are Just Wrappers
AI

The Problem With “AI Startups” That Are Just Wrappers

Quite a lot of AI startups today are not building models. They are packaging OpenAI, Anthropic or other foundation models behind a thin UI or workflow. That is not automatically wrong. But it creates material risks for buyers that many companies ignore until it is too late. Below is a clear view of

3 December 2025
Third and Fourth Party Supply Chain Risk
Awareness

Third and Fourth Party Supply Chain Risk

Third-party risk is now one of the biggest blind spots in UK cyber security. Most attacks still land through simple things like phishing and poor patching, but when something really disruptive happens, a supplier is often involved somewhere in the chain. Government and NCSC-aligned data backs this u

28 November 2025
When the threat comes from within!
Awareness

When the threat comes from within!

In November 2025, CrowdStrike publicly announced that it had terminated an insider who leaked screenshots of internal dashboards to a hacker collective. While CrowdStrike maintains its systems were not compromised and customer data was unaffected, the incident highlights a critical truth: insider th

25 November 2025
How to Spot Burnout in Your Team Early and What to Do About It
Awareness

How to Spot Burnout in Your Team Early and What to Do About It

Burnout does not arrive overnight. It builds quietly. By the time someone says they are struggling, the damage is already showing in delivery, morale, and judgment. If you lead a team, you need to catch the early signals and adjust the environment before you lose people or performance. What burnout

24 November 2025
The Latest Salesforce Incident and Third-Party App Risk
Awareness

The Latest Salesforce Incident and Third-Party App Risk

More and more organisations increasingly rely on ecosystems of connected applications and integrations to drive business value. However, the recent incident involving Salesforce and a third-party app vendor underscores a sobering reality: the attack surface has extended well beyond the core platform

21 November 2025
Incident Response Exercises. Why They Matter for Every Business
Awareness

Incident Response Exercises. Why They Matter for Every Business

Incident response exercises are no longer a luxury for large enterprises. They are a practical necessity for organisations of every size. Cyber incidents remain one of the most disruptive events a business can face. They create operational downtime, financial loss, reputational damage, and regulator

20 November 2025
What Happened at Cloudflare and Why It Matters
Awareness

What Happened at Cloudflare and Why It Matters

Incident Overview On Tuesday 18 November 2025, Cloudflare experienced a significant global outage that disrupted access to multiple high-profile web services and applications. The company, which handles approximately 20 % of the world’s web traffic reported that the root cause was a configuration fi

19 November 2025
AI Augmented Threats. The Defining Cybersecurity Battle of 2025
AI

AI Augmented Threats. The Defining Cybersecurity Battle of 2025

Artificial intelligence has rapidly become one of the most transformative forces in technology. It has disrupted how organisations operate, how decisions are made, and how data is processed at scale. Cyber security has always adapted to change, yet the rise of generative AI has created a shift unlik

18 November 2025
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