SAFE cyber resilience framewok

Assess, prioritise and improve resilience continually

SAFE businesses become more resilient by making prioritised, informed investments.
‍Strategy, Assessment, Frameworks and Execution cycles deliver reports and actions to drive measurable ROI.

SAFE explained

A clear process that continually assesses and improves resilience

Resilience-focused organisations need more than a one-off technical review and isolated security fixes. With every SAFE cycle, your resilience builds.

A SAFE business can prove it has ...

Absolute clarity over holistic cyber resilience status
Prioritised investment based on business risk and impact
Regular reports to show progress and support GRC
Refined insurance scoping
Measurably improved resilience posture

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Why SAFE matters

Resilience is way more than just a technical concern

SAFE scores resilience across all areas of your organisation, including its ability to grow safely.

Having controls in place is not the same as knowing how resilient you are. SAFE replaces fragmented security with a measurable, defensible resilience strategy.

Leaders use SAFE because they need:

Clearer visibility of cyber and resilience gaps
Sharper resilience investment planning
Sound evidence for board, insurer, and audit conversations
Improved confidence in budgeting decisions
Security embedded and understood across all teams
Clear evidence of progress and improvements over time

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Value of the SAFE process

Continuous, improving resilience

Threats evolve, business priorities shift, and the attack surface expands. Resilience must by dynamic to keep up.

SAFE is not just a one-off report or cyber health check. It is a cyclical cyber resilience process that drives continuous improvement.

Resilience strengthens in a planned, measurable way
Previous investment can be reviewed against actual progress
New risks can be identified before they become bigger issues
Investment decisions are based on current evidence, not outdated assumptions
Cyber strategy evolves alongside the business and its risk profile

SAFE turns cyber security from a reactive concern into an ongoing resilience capability.

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Download SAFE intro pack

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"It's like night and day"

Mark Petar, Head of Systems, Montanaro: SAFE webinar guest

"SAFE from ITHQ is not an audit, it's an evidence-based discussion with proportional outcomes aligned to business needs. When management sees the old reports compared with the new ones, they can see exactly where [my budget's] gone, where the time and effort's gone ... We can basically prove: 'Look at the difference we've made.' The SAFE reports provide an independent view of our systems like Pen Tests and are 32 pages long: very useful in many regulation-centric scenarios.

The difference in what ITHQ has done for us as a company is just gigantic."

Watch SAFE webinar

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The SAFE process

3 steps that build resilience and deliver ongoing ROI

The strength of SAFE lies in its continuity. Each cycle builds on the last, demonstrating improvements made and business impact.

1. Assess

Get a clear, evidence-based view of your cyber resilience, security posture, and maturity. This establishes a realistic baseline and highlights where risk is highest.

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2. Prioritise

Identify the most important gaps, risks, and improvement areas so leadership attention, budget, and action are focused where they will have the greatest business impact.

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3. Improve

Turn findings into a practical security roadmap, then review and reassess regularly to strengthen resilience as threats evolve and the attack surface changes.

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Measurement across 19 domains

Measurement is key to improvement. We use established frameworks to create 19 benchmarked domains and score against them.

Our 19 SAFE domains cover all critical areas and can be grouped into 4 main areas of scrutiny: security policies, data protection, exposure and information security management system (ISMS).

A combination of scorecards, reports and visual data representations deliver a 360 degree view of your resilience profile that enable highly informed board level security investment discussions, and offer proof of improvement activities for GRC and insurance purposes.

The spider graphs below are typical of a visual way in which we demonstrate progress. Each point represents one of the 19 domains, with each concentric line a measure of achievement. Resilient businesses will place all points on the green or blue lines ...

Security Policies: All security policies across the business including security team training and security awareness training for other teams

Data Protection: Identity and access management, user and entity behaviour analysis, secure remote access, endpoint protection and data loss prevention

Exposure: Vulnerability management, network and systems security, asset management, observability, incident response management, business continuity

ISMS: Service provider management, information sharing and collaboration, lessons learned and improvement

Radar chart showing SAFE summary scores with zones for Danger, Warning, Good, and Excellent levels around the scale.

Day zero

Radar chart titled SAFE Summary Score Chart showing score from Danger to Excellent across 20 categories.

6 month retest

Radar chart titled SAFE Summary Score Chart shows initial baseline scores with categories ranging from Danger to Excellent.

12 month retest

"We couldn't do it without ITHQ"

Philip Mitchell, IT Director, The Hippodrome Casino

ITHQ has delivered strategy-led, layered solutions to The Hippodrome Casino since 2022. Read the full story ...

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1. Assess

Understand your current cyber resilience position against industry benchmarks

SAFE: Assess reviews your organisation’s security posture across key resilience domains to establish a realistic baseline

This is not a superficial checklist exercise. SAFE uses our blended framework approach to assess how well your current controls, processes, governance, and operational practices support measurable resilience.

SAFE: Assess:

Evaluates current security posture across key resilience domains
Establishes a clear cyber maturity baseline
Identifies strengths, weaknesses, and potential blind spots
Uses evidence and recognised frameworks rather than assumption
Creates a strong foundation for decision-making and prioritisation

Assess helps leadership move from uncertainty to an evidence-based understanding of current cyber resilience.

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2. Prioritise

Turn findings into clear priorities

SAFE: Prioritise translates evidence into scored analysis, visual summaries, and practical next steps

Teams don't need overwhelming technical detail, they need to know how to reduce risk fast. Prioritise shows where resilience is strongest, where exposure is highest, and which issues need attention first.

SAFE: Prioritise: