Genium4 | Cyber Security Consulting

Bringing quality, empathy and smart-thinking to cyber security consulting

With our breadth and depth of technical, business and inter-personal skills, Genium4 has a unique approach in creating lasting improvements to our clients’ cyber security. What really sets us apart is our understanding that cyber security is a business activity enabled by the people that work towards it. We leverage our experience to think outside the box, mobilising security teams to be the best that they can be.

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Eliminating the root causes of cyber security issues

Overcoming specific weaknesses and vulnerabilities is an important part of security, but often consumes all of a security team’s time and effort and is difficult to keep up with. Our focus is on addressing the causes of these vulnerabilities and preventing them from occurring in the first place. We believe this is the only sustainable way to improve an organisation’s security in the long term.

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Improving client team effectiveness to bring lasting change

Whilst not solely a security skill, the ability to communicate and negotiate with empathy across the business is vital for an effective cyber security team. Whatever the nature of engagement with our clients, we work alongside security and operational teams to coach them in developing effective ways of engaging with each other and with other areas of the business. This gives them the skills needed to maintain effectiveness into the future.

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Fixing security issues, not just reporting on them

Too often, consultants create more work than they achieve. Our focus is to change the way that client teams work to make the business more efficient and ultimately more secure. This may be by leveraging existing business processes to work for security, improving individual skillsets or removing organisational inhibitors to good security. Any action plans that we develop with the client are focussed, pragmatic and achievable.

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Challenging current cyber security practises through honest conversations

We know that the only way to make real improvements in cyber security is to be open and upfront about the threat landscape, organisational maturity and human factors that will influence a client’s level of risk exposure. We are straightforward with our clients and not afraid to challenge the status quo where needed, always being mindful of individual needs and the sensitive business environment. We give individuals the confidence to speak up.

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What we do

At Genium4, we aim to make lasting improvement to our clients’ cyber security position by investing in security and operational teams’ business and personal skills, whilst transforming their technical and process capability. We bring extensive range and depth of security and business experience to offer services across: strategy and governance; security assurance; penetration testing; SDLC and security in projects; security operations; incident response and crisis management. As part of our commitment to creating lasting change, we keep continual open relationships with our clients where they can call for advice at any time.

Our view on Cyber Security

Cyber Security is hard to get right. After 25 years of developing standards, products and educating users, organisations still struggle to implement strong cyber security practices, leading to breaches and service outages. Reviews of the state of security produce excessively long lists of improvement activity for the security team, which are difficult to keep up with.

We believe we need to view cyber security from a different perspective. We have studied and understand the inhibitors to achieving good security. Our goal is to help organisations overcome these inhibitors to achieve real reductions in cyber risk.

Common Inhibitors to good cyber security include:

Inappropriate executive risk indicators
Implicit acceptance of risk within projects
Lack of coverage of monitoring capability
Focus on functional deployments in development
Time and resource pressures in IT operations
Backlogs in release and change management processes
Out of date inventory and configuration databases
Slow testing and deployment of patches
Responding to symptoms rather than root causes

Together, our services summarise our general approach to overcoming these inhibitors. The services are structured to provide insights into our backgrounds and experience, our technical capability and the professional and personal skills we deploy to make lasting cyber security improvements.

Cyber Security Services

We have categorised our technical capability into the following services. With our extensive experience and root cause, people-centred approach, we can assist with a range of cyber security and technology risk challenges. To discuss your specific needs, please get in touch.

People & Communications

It is widely recognised that people are one of the primary challenges to effective security; whether from the errors, overlooked security requirements, lack of awareness or the malicious insider, almost all security incidents have a human element to them.

Security Strategy & Governance

Consistently, we see that security risk is not well integrated with other business risk processes. It often falls outside of good risk governance practices that exist as part of the overall business risk management.

Security Assurance

A security assurance function should be fully integrated into wider business assurance to be effective in providing confidence to management about the current exposure to cyber risk.

Penetration Testing

Penetration Testing gives organisations insights into the real weaknesses in their security and, when properly performed, allows them to understand and remediate not just the vulnerabilities themselves but the root causes that underlie them.

SDLC and Security in Projects

When organisations undertake any form of change, there is a potential to add new risks to the equation. This is particularly true, from a cyber security perspective, when there is development of new systems or changes to systems and infrastructure.

Effective Security Operations

We often hear from boards and business leadership that they are unable to understand whether they are getting an effective return on their investment into security. Security is often seen as an ‘expensive black box’ which results in frustration from the business...

Incident Response and Crisis management

Even in the best governed and operated security functions, incidents are, unfortunately, a likely occurrence. Incident management and crisis management, while often being more an art than a science, requires effective and regular communication with business stakeholders.

Teaming Services

We offer staff augmentation services to fulfil strategic security roles at our clients either to provide interim coverage between full time employees or as ongoing service. We bring our unique and personal approach to these roles to transfer our values of teaming and making a lasting difference.