Learn more about the Scottish Business Resilience Centre

SFHA has teamed up with Scottish Business Resilience Centre to host a virtual conference, ‘Cyber security in housing’, on Wednesday 8 June from 09:30–12:40. By attending the conference, you’ll hear about different methods and practical actions to implement in order to quickly improve and increase your cyber resilience. You can view the full programme here.

The Scottish Business Resilience Centre (SBRC) is a not-for-profit and a respected voice in business resilience, bringing together the Scottish Government, Police Scotland, Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, and the Scottish business community. SBRC’s vision is to become the catalyst that makes Scotland one of the safest and most resilient places to live, work and do business, both on and off-line, especially during these times of economic recovery.

It is our intention that every Scottish organisation has the skills and knowledge to protect themselves against online attacks. We achieve this through the delivery of education and preventative training as well as actively raising awareness of threats throughout the business community.

Our focused work areas include:

1. Community and membership We provide relevant help and advice to our growing membership and community base, across Scotland, at a time they need it most. Join our community here.
2. Prevent and protect Increasing communication and collaboration through our unique connection with Police Scotland, Scottish Fire and Rescue and Scottish Government. Find out more about protecting your organisation here.
3. Skills and education Building the next generation of cyber specialists and further developing on and off-line resilience training for the business community. Learn more about educating your team here.

Our unique connection to Police Scotland, Scottish Fire and Rescue Service and Scottish Government gives us exclusive access to the latest information on legislation, criminal trends, and threats, allowing us to provide the very best advice to the business community.

By increasing communication and collaboration between services and partners, we aim to become a central point for business and cyber resilience messaging for business.

This includes our Incident Response initiative and Trusted Partner network.

One of our flagship programmes, in collaboration with the Scottish Government, is the cyber exercising toolkit, Exercise in a Box. It is an online, self-help tool from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) which is designed to help organisations test and practice their response to a cyber-attack. It is a free, 90-minute non-technical workshop which helps organisations to find out how resilient they are to cyber-attacks and to practice their response in a safe environment.

It is, in essence, a box full of exercises that are based on real world scenarios, with probing questions attached to each scenario. It allows your organisation to do them in your own time, in a safe environment, as many times as you want. It includes everything you need for setting up, planning, delivery, and post-exercise activity, all in one place.

Exercise in a Box has been piloted with the health and social care sectors, along with a major focus on housing associations, which also includes small and medium enterprises, local government and the emergency services, but also other private and public sector communities could benefit from using it depending on their needs. We have seen companies, of all sizes and sectors, complete a scenario and see great benefit, however, micro-companies, sole traders, or companies at a very early stage of tech development may not get the full value in joining.

At SBRC, we have been tasked with promoting and expertly delivering Exercise in a Box to Scottish companies by conducting practical workshops where we facilitate one of the scenarios. Read more here.

The Exercise in a Box delivery project in Scotland began in October 2020. Since then, SBRC has successfully delivered 78 workshops to the public, private and third sectors, across the country, that have been attended by 628 organisations and 1,663 attendees, themed on four scenarios, ‘Working From Home’, Ransomware, Digital Supply Chain, and ‘Micro Exercises’. During this time, we put together a case study highlighting the success story and milestones of the first phase of the project at SBRC.

One of the attendees, Scott Barnett, Head of Information and Cyber Security, NHS Scotland National Shared Services, said: “The SBRC Ethical Hacking team's partnership with NCSC delivers informative, actionable and real world-based cyber scenarios that are incredibly useful, for a range of roles, in any organisation. NHS Scotland NSS will be exploring these scenarios to identify gaps in our prevent, detect and response processes and procedures and to engage other areas of our business on cyber matters.”