The most common reasons businesses fail their Cyber Essentials assessment

Most failures aren't wholesale non-compliance. They're one or two specific, predictable gaps in an otherwise reasonable setup. The same handful of issues come up again and again, which is exactly why they're worth checking for by name rather than hoping a general "we're pretty secure" is enough.

In practice, the repeat offenders are: MFA missing on a free or unofficial cloud tool nobody thought to check, a patching process too slow for the 14-day critical-update window, an assessment scope that quietly excludes home or remote workers' devices, and admin accounts still being used for everyday email and browsing instead of being kept separate.

None of these are hard to fix once you know exactly where they are. They're hard to fix when you find out for the first time during a paid assessment. Run the free 5-minute readiness check to find out if any of these apply to you before that happens.