Case Study

Securing Cyber Security Certification at Scale

IASME use BlockMark Registry to issue and manage Cyber Essentials certificates and badges

About IASME
IASME is a UK cyber security certification company based in the Malvern Hills, with additional offices in Belfast and Dalgety Bay, near Edinburgh. Working with a network of over 1000 cyber security experts, IASME helps organisations of all sizes improve and demonstrate their cyber security posture. IASME is the sole Delivery Partner for the National Cyber Security Centre’s (NCSC) Cyber Essentials scheme, and delivers a further range of certification schemes covering everything from IoT devices and connected vessels to defence supply chains. All are underpinned by a commitment to making cyber security accessible, fair, and inclusive for organisations across the UK and beyond.

The Challenge
As the sole Delivery Partner for Cyber Essentials, one of the UK’s most widely adopted cyber security certifications, IASME needed a certificate issuance and management platform capable of operating at scale. With thousands of certifications issued across their range of schemes each month, IASME required a system that could integrate seamlessly into their existing assessment workflows, as well as issue certificates automatically and reliably at volume. They also wished to provide certified organisations with a badge they could display online whilst reducing fraud and misrepresentation.

The Solution
IASME worked with BlockMark Technologies to manage certificate issuance across their full portfolio of schemes, including Cyber Essentials, Cyber Advisor, IASME Cyber Assurance, IoT Cyber Baseline, Maritime Cyber Baseline, and more. Using BlockMark Registry’s API, IASME has issued over 200,000 certificates to date, integrating certificate generation directly with their own assessment platform with minimal manual overhead.

Alongside certificate issuance, IASME makes extensive use of BlockMark’s smart badges. Unlike static image badges that can be copied and misused, BlockMark’s smart badges are dynamically verified so that badges are only displayed whilst a certificate is valid or has been superseded with a newer issue. The smart badges also update automatically wherever they’re embedded, allowing IASME to roll out improvements, such as accessibility enhancements, across every live badge instantly, without needing certified organisations to take any action themselves

Results

With BlockMark Registry underpinning their certificate issuance, IASME has been able to scale quickly to match demand across a growing family of schemes, while maintaining the integrity and trustworthiness of every certificate and badge in circulation.
The combination of high-volume API-driven issuance and dynamically updatable smart badges means that IASME can continue to grow their reach whilst protecting the brand and integrity of their certification schemes

“Cyber Essentials is a widely recognised certification mark for UK organisations, so trust in the associated badge matters enormously to us. BlockMark Registry lets us issue certificates at scale via their API and the smart badges give organisations something they can display with confidence, knowing it will update automatically on renewal.”
Dr Emma Philpott, CEO, IASME Consortium Ltd