Product development – designing today for the future We are committed to building new products, which support our sustainability commitments and meet our customers’ current and future needs. Our product development ethos is to improve our end-to-end product design and build processes, ensuring we design with sustainability in mind, purposely and continuously. This approach enabled us to be agile in adapting many of our products to be purchased, deployed and implemented remotely, ensuring we could support our customers as they moved to remote/ hybrid working models due to pandemic restrictions. (An example of this is our Firebase appliance illustrated opposite.) Another critical element of our design approach is to ensure our product offerings are accessible. Our new Calibrate platform, which offers intelligent data-driven cyber resilience dashboards to guide risk strategy, is a great example of this. The platform was purposely designed to support user accessibility for those with the visual impairment of colour blindness. This inclusive design provides high colour contrast visual aids to support the interactive engagement between users and the Calibrate platform. We listen to our customers, ensuring their voice is represented in the products we take to market. At the very start of the pandemic in early 2020, an important consideration for organisations around the world was how they were going to function as restrictions impacted their traditional way of working. With remote working becoming the norm, trust was required to make it work.
Firebase
With 80% of the work we traditionally do for customers already being delivered remotely, one area that is often overlooked is routine security testing. In 2018 our consultants developed an appliance – Firebase – that would enable remote security testing to be conducted – a great example of designing for the future. From the early prototype, NCC Group’s Nick Watkins developed the current appliance as a research project supported by Simon Beattie. Their current version can be downloaded or posted and provides our customers with a credible and necessary alternative to ensuring their systems were secure. Initially launched in the UK, and later in North America and our APAC region, the Firebase appliance is being developed and used to support our incident response teams as well as being planned for use by our European business. Between 1 April 2020 and 31 May 2021, we conducted 761 jobs using Firebase, which equalled 11,656 days of remote working, and with an average of a 45–50 mile round trip from a consultant’s home to customer premises, we reduced our travel impact by c.500–600k miles – the equivalent of 20–25 times around the world. We will continue to engage with customers and encourage continued deployment of security testing remotely to improve efficiency for their business and remove unnecessary travel, which has a negative impact on climate change.
We design today for the future, working in collaboration with our colleagues across the Group, understanding the whole needs of our customers and ensuring our product offerings are accessible by all.
Michelle Barry Director of Product and Development
NCC Group plc — Annual report and accounts for the year ended 31 May 2021
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