Prepare for the New Financial Year and Get the Most from Your Public Sector Budget Today

How can you get the most from your public sector budget when finalising IT spend for the coming financial year? We recommend taking four key steps to secure the budget you need to continue your digital transformation.

With financial year end fast approaching, public sector organisations throughout the UK are reviewing budgets and planning for the coming year. The efficient, secure delivery of resident services is most likely at the very top of many organisations’ agendas. As we continue to operate in a ‘new normal’ where remote working has become standard, what is the best way to plan future spending to enhance your organisation’s technology foundations for maximum efficiency?

The Public Sector Landscape

As we reach the end of the 2021 financial year the public sector, like many others, finds itself in a period of unprecedented change. This can make it hard for public sector organisations to establish where and how budget should be allocated, and what to prioritise for the best return on investment that will most benefit the residents they serve.

The public sector is one of the most targeted sectors for cyber-crime in the UK. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) recognises this, and understand that any breach or downtime resulting from outdated or inadequately protected technology can bring inefficiencies – never more so than at present when civil servants are working remotely. With teams deployed to work remotely at short notice, attack surfaces have increased drastically as users continue to work from home, far beyond the safety of the office network. Now is the time to look over remote working security deployments and ensure they are robust and appropriately secure in today’s hostile digital landscape.

So what can your organisation do to maximise security and accelerate digital transformation plans during this critical budgetary period? At Six Degrees we have put together a suite of services that will help organisations like yours get the most from their budgets, protect their environment from the challenges brought about over the past 12 months, and prepare for the coming year.

Prepare for the Coming Year

Taking the following four steps will leave your organisation, your IT systems and your end user services in great shape for the coming financial year:

• Optimise and secure your applications with their native controls – starting with Microsoft 365. In order to safeguard and protect your organisation and end users from cyber-attacks, ensure the applications that you use are optimised with the right security controls in place. In some instances, native features and controls can be configured to retire additional security solutions you may be paying for. Your Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 licences, for example, can be configured to secure your endpoints – freeing up unnecessary spend on alternative protection and opening up the potential for reinvestment.
• Begin a regular schedule of penetration testing. Penetration testing establishes any external weaknesses that could give cybercriminals access to your systems. However, one test per year is not enough for organisations with evolving IT infrastructures. Six Degrees offers Dynamic Penetration Testing to ensure your infrastructure is continually assessed for potential weaknesses.
• Undertake a cloud readiness assessment. If the movement of on-premises servers has made you consider your digital transformation journey and how you could move your workloads to the cloud, your first step is to undertake a cloud readiness assessment. Establish where you are on your digital transformation journey, and how you can adopt cloud in a risk-free manner.
• Carry out a server healthcheck. By assessing the health of your servers, you can discover and address any points of weakness that could be exploited. Unpatched or outdated server operating systems are one of the key attack vectors utilised by cybercriminals. Close the gaps and improve your overall security posture.

Get the Most from Your Public Sector Budget

Until the end of your financial year on 31^st March 2021, we are offering 20% off list price of the services above to enable you to use your financial year budget effectively in these challenging times and deliver services that will accelerate your IT strategy in the new financial year.

To speak to our experts today who will go beyond to support you and your organisation, request a free call back.