Insurer Aviva moves to strengthen brokers’ cyber defences

The campaign forms part of Aviva’s work as a national ambassador for the National Cyber Resilience Centre Group (NCRCG), which sits alongside nine regional centres to make up the complete CRC network. The network’s overarching mission is to improve the cyber resilience of the UK’s SME community.

Through this first-of-its-kind initiative, Aviva is recommending that over 3,000 of its brokers take up a free membership at their regional CRC, where they will be able to access a range of resources, guidance and training in order to protect their business against potential cyber risk. Each regional centre is police-led and set up to provide exactly the type of affordable, yet high-quality cyber resilience services that SMEs now require.

Through direct communications with its broker base as well as bespoke webinars, Aviva is raising awareness of the importance of cyber resilience and highlighting where businesses can go for the advice and support they need.

Following the success of this campaign, similar initiatives are in the pipeline at NCRCG, with several of the organisation’s national ambassadors set to roll out comparable campaigns among their own supply chains and customer bases.

Valuable resource

Stephen Ridley, head of cyber at Aviva, said: “Cyber Resilience Centres provide access to high quality – and, generally, free – advice and guidance. This can offer brokers and their customers a valuable resource to help them improve their cyber resilience.”

Ridley continued: “Cyber protection can be a complicated area. By taking advantage of our offer of free membership to their regional CRC, brokers can ensure they are accessing clear and concise messaging from a trusted source. It’s only through collaboration across the public and private sectors that we will be able to solve the cyber challenge.”

Paul Lopez, director of the Eastern Cyber Resilience Centre, added: “It’s excellent to have this kind of support from such a well-known and respected company. Aviva’s trusted position in the marketplace as an insurer affords us a really important route into the businesses with whom it partners and serves, enabling us to spread our message of cyber resilience further than we ever could do by working in isolation.”

In the right direction

Detective Superintendent Ian Kirby, CEO at the NCRCG, explained: “We are so pleased to have partnered with Aviva to launch this first-of-its kind campaign. It’s a perfect example of an invaluable, yet straightforward way in which larger organisations can help to strengthen the cyber resilience of smaller organisations by pointing them in the right direction to find trusted cyber support and advice.”

Kirby concluded: “Over the coming months, we’re looking forward to scaling up this particular campaign and transferring all that we have learned to similar initiatives we have in the pipeline with our other national ambassador partners.”

Established in 2021, the NCRCG is a strategic collaboration between the Home Office, policing, national ambassador partners and academia to strengthen cyber resilience across the nation’s SME community.

Key to the NCRCG’s reach are nine CRCs which operate across England and Wales to provide affordable and high-quality cyber resilience services for local organisations. These services are delivered by the NCRCG’s Cyber PATH student team under the supervision of cyber security practitioners.

The NCRCG’s national ambassador programme is a platform through which the nation’s large organisations can ‘lead the charge’ against cyber crime.