At LIMA, we are incredibly choosy about the partners we work with in the security space, and with good reason. Threats continue to grow and evolve, headline hacks are becoming more common, and it’s imperative for organisations to build a robust security strategy.  

One vendor that gets the LIMA stamp of approval is Hornetsecurity – a global expert for comprehensive Microsoft 365 protection, cloud-based email security, backup, compliance, and security awareness solutions, all delivered via a single platform.

As a result of our ever-strengthening relationship with Hornetsecurity, we are pleased to announce that we’ve achieved Hornetsecurity Gold Partner status! This milestone represents a significant step forward in our commitment to delivering top-tier cybersecurity services to our customers.

In addition to achieving Gold Partner status, LIMA was named Hornetsecurity’s Partner of the Year earlier this year.

Strengthening LIMA’s security offering

As cyber threats continue to evolve, businesses require advanced, reliable, and flexible security solutions.

Hornetsecurity’s portfolio offers powerful protection against a wide range of online threats, from spam and malware to ransomware and phishing attacks. By joining forces with Hornetsecurity, we enhance our ability to provide cutting-edge security solutions to our clients, ensuring they can operate with minimal risk in a secure environment.

What does this partnership mean for LIMA customers?

At LIMA, we’ve had great success in helping our customers – large and small businesses across a range of sectors – consolidate these important security services into a single package from a single supplier at a fantastic price point.

Becoming a Gold Partner enables us to unlock even greater resources, tools, and support from Hornetsecurity. This partnership provides us with enhanced access to training, technical support, and industry-leading products, all of which allow us to better serve our customers’ needs.

For our customers, this collaboration means an even more robust cybersecurity offering, that is built on trusted and proven technologies. Hornetsecurity’s solutions, which include cloud-based email security, web filtering and backup services, integrate seamlessly with our existing manged service portfolio, providing an all-encompassing approach to digital security.

LIMA CTO Martin Ingham said: 

“Achieving Gold Partner status is testament to our growing expertise in deploying Hornetsecurity’s solutions, and our ongoing dedication to providing our customers with the best in cybersecurity. Businesses want to protect their 365 environments and their wider infrastructure, but don’t want to deal with dozens of different service providers. LIMA and Hornetsecurity as a partnership provide a brilliant solution to this challenge.”

Irvin Shillingford, Regional Manager, Northern Europe at Hornetsecurity, added: 

“Congratulations to LIMA for achieving Gold Partner status. We are excited about the growth and development of our partnership with LIMA. Business will benefit from LIMA’s strong expertise in managing IT systems and implementing Hornetsecurity’s extensive range of next-generation, cloud-based security solutions. These include compliance, backup, and security awareness offerings, designed to support companies and organisations of all sizes globally.”

Are you feeling the sting of managing security requirements?

Contact one of our experts on 0345 345 1110 to discuss how we can help, or drop us an email: enquiries@lima.co.uk

We are excited to announce that LIMA has achieved the status of Dell Gold Partner, marking a significant milestone in our ongoing commitment to providing outstanding outcomes for our customers.

The latest development in LIMA’s partnership with Dell is testament to years of successful delivery of Dell technology across cloud, infrastructure and security projects.

What does this mean for LIMA customers?

Access to best-in-class technology

As a Gold Dell Partner, LIMA has direct access to Dell’s premium product range, including cutting-edge hardware, software and IT infrastructure solutions. This enables us to offer customers the latest tech, while ensuring optimal performance, scalability and security.

Enhanced support and expertise

With the Gold Partner status, LIMA can provide ever-more specialised and tailored strategic consultancy around Dell’s technologies. LIMA customers benefit from quicker response times, deeper technical insights and solutions that are designed to solve even the most complex business challenges.

Streamlined IT solutions for resilience and growth

Dell’s portfolio complements LIMA’s focus on resilience, optimisation, and growth. From cloud strategies to business continuity and cybersecurity, this partnership strengthens our ability to deliver integrated IT solutions that help organisations deliver on their strategic priorities.

LIMA CTO Martin Ingham commented:

“Our Gold Partnership with Dell ensures that our customers continue to get the very best in performance, security and scalability. We’re committed to building deep relationships with a broad range of technology partners to ensure that our customers have the right tools, whatever the job.”

At LIMA, our goal is to empower customers with the best tools and services to drive success. Our Dell Gold Partnership takes us one step closer to achieving that by enhancing the value we deliver and strengthening our position as a trusted IT partner.

Looking for an IT partner that help you go for gold?

Call us on 0345 345 1110 to discuss how we can help, or drop us an email to arrange a meeting: enquiries@lima.co.uk

In 2025, IT teams are tasked with the increasingly complex task of managing cybersecurity requirements alongside an ever-growing list of responsibilities.

Organisations are striving to improve their security posture, while driving awareness of security issues internally, and ensuring end users are using systems and data securely.

Proactive teams monitor and audit IT systems to detect early signs of compromise, but time and resources are not on their side.

Day-to-day IT support is still the main occupier of time, with more than 59% of IT teams spending most of their time on IT support. The 9am rush of phone calls about password resets, software issues and trapped emails is still very real.

Meanwhile, time spent on protecting against security threats is just 16%, much of which is swallowed up delivering patches, workarounds and fixes within CE+ timeframes.

Without the time to dedicate to proactive security activities, a lack of regular and reliable visibility of external vulnerabilities leads to increased cyber risk.

Amidst all of this, annual penetration testing remains a staple of the IT and security team’s toolkit.

Why do we penetration test?

• Conducting annual security tests is considered good practice in the industry. Regular testing can help to ensure security measures are up-to-date and effective.
• Standards like PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) mandate annual security assessments to protect cardholder data.
• Testing may help you to meet and evidence the requirements of other frameworks including GDPR and ISO 27001.
• Annual security tests provide external validation of your security posture. This can help to build trust with stakeholders, including customers, partners and regulators.
• Many cyber insurance policies require regular security assessments to prove proactive management of security risks. By performing annual tests, you can meet these requirements and potentially benefit from lower premiums or better coverage terms.
• Many customers and suppliers expect partners to have strong security practices in place. Annual security tests can be a requirement in contracts or service level agreements.

Four ways to get the most out of your annual test

While penetration tests remain an important part of many organisations’ security strategy, there are several areas in which they fall short. By having an awareness of the trusty pen test’s shortcomings, you can make sure you’re effectively filling the gaps and maximising the return on your security investment.

1. Use your test as a benchmark

Annual security testing provides a snapshot of your system’s security posture at a specific point in time. While you may make improvements based on the test results, new vulnerabilities can be introduced through subsequent changes or configurations. While your annual test is a useful benchmark, your security status can quickly become outdated, leaving your system exposed to new threats that arise after the test.

2. Be aware that your environment constantly evolves

Annual tests might not capture the dynamic nature of your IT environment. Systems, applications and networks are constantly evolving, and new vulnerabilities can emerge at any time. Relying solely on annual testing can give a false sense of security, as it may not account for changes or new threats that occur between tests.

3. Be very clear about what needs to be in scope

Security tests are often scoped to focus on specific areas or components of your environment. If certain systems or applications are excluded from the scope, potential vulnerabilities in those areas may go undetected. This can leave significant parts of your infrastructure unprotected and vulnerable to attack. If you miss an element from your annual test, it’s usually tricky and/or expensive to re-run it with an amended scope.

4. Fill in the gap in your testing cycle

Cyber incidents can occur at any time, and the average timescale for detecting and responding to these incidents is often much shorter than your testing cycle. Annual testing does not provide the continuous monitoring needed to detect and respond to threats in real-time. This misalignment can result in delayed detection and response, increasing the risk of a successful attack. Have a plan for filling the gap.

How can you fill the gap left by annual testing?

Annual testing falls short because it’s static, it’s unresponsive to change and it allows a huge window of time for vulnerabilities to be introduced and exploited. The lifecycle of a security breach is less than an annual testing cycle.

LIMA has developed a solution to perfectly complement, and in some cases replace, your annual security test.

Vulnerability Detection and Remediation (VDR) from LIMA uses a combination of software and human intervention to review your environment, reveal vulnerabilities and resolve them within an SLA that’s aligned to Cyber Essentials Plus.

By using VDR you can remove the risks presented by your annual test and free up the time and resources taken up by the constant demands of patching within your IT team.

1. Use your test as a benchmark

Because the average lifecycle of a vulnerability and its eventual exploitation is within your annual security test timeframe, we need to reduce window.

One of the key motivations to test more frequently is for the purpose of retesting, which involves running the same tests again after remediation to confirm that any fix has been successful. Even simple errors, like forgetting to reboot after applying a patch, can cause a vulnerability to persist.

With VDR, changes and developments in your environment are reviewed on a continuous basis. The service spots vulnerabilities and remediates them against an SLA aligned with Cyber Essentials requirements.

2. Be aware that your environment constantly evolves

VDR gives a picture of your environment, with no changes required to allow access – which is often a requirement of penetration testing. In fact, we recommend you keep everything as it is on a day-to-day basis so we get a full and accurate view, and we can see what layer of your stack is compromised or at risk.

3. Be very clear about what needs to be in scope

With asset-based pricing, you select the assets that you want to be covered by the scan. These can change and flex on a monthly basis in response to shifting requirements. 

4. Fill in the gap in your testing cycle

VDR scans are run near-continuously, and when we spot a vulnerability, we address it within the SLA window, comfortably beating the average lifecycle of a vulnerability and filling the gap left behind by annual testing.  

VDR continuously scans your environment for vulnerabilities and resolves them before they can be exploited, keeping you ahead of the game in the fight against cybercrime.

Want to remove the cyber-strain from your IT team? Contact one of our experts on 0345 345 1110 to discuss your free cyber-readiness assessment, or drop us an email: enquiries@lima.co.uk

At LIMA, we are incredibly choosy about the partners we work with in the security space, and with good reason. Threats continue to grow and evolve, making it ever-more critical for organisations to have a robust security strategy.

One vendor that gets the LIMA stamp of approval is Hornetsecurity – a global expert for comprehensive Microsoft 365 protection, cloud-based email security, backup, compliance, and security awareness solutions, all delivered via a single platform.

As a result of our ever-strengthening relationship with Hornetsecurity, we are pleased to announce that we’ve achieved Hornetsecurity Silver Partner status! This milestone represents a significant step forward in our commitment to delivering top-tier cybersecurity services to our customers.

Strengthening LIMA’s security offering

As cyber threats continue to evolve, businesses require advanced, reliable, and flexible security solutions.

Hornetsecurity’s portfolio offers powerful protection against a wide range of online threats, from spam and malware to ransomware and phishing attacks. By joining forces with Hornetsecurity, we enhance our ability to provide cutting-edge security solutions to our clients, ensuring they can operate with minimal risk in a secure environment.

What does this partnership mean for LIMA and its customers?

At LIMA, we’ve had great success in helping our customers – large and small businesses across a range of sectors – consolidate these important security services into a single package from a single supplier at a fantastic price point.

Becoming a Silver Partner enables us to unlock even greater resources, tools, and support from Hornetsecurity. This partnership provides us with enhanced access to training, technical support, and industry-leading products, all of which allow us to better serve our customers’ needs.

For our customers, this collaboration means an even more robust cybersecurity offering that is built on trusted and proven technologies. Hornetsecurity’s solutions, which include cloud-based email security, web filtering, and backup services, will be integrated seamlessly with our existing services, providing an all-encompassing approach to digital security.

LIMA CTO Martin Ingham said: 

“Achieving Silver Partner status is testament to our growing expertise in deploying Hornetsecurity’s solutions, and our ongoing dedication to providing our customers with the best in cybersecurity. Businesses want to protect their 365 environments and their wider infrastructure, but don’t want to deal with dozens of different service providers. LIMA and Hornetsecurity as a partnership provide a brilliant solution to this challenge.”

Irvin Shillingford, Regional Manager, Northern Europe at Hornetsecurity, added: 

“We are excited about the growth and development of our partnership with LIMA. Business will benefit from LIMA’s strong expertise in managing IT systems and implementing Hornetsecurity’s extensive range of next-generation, cloud-based security solutions. These include compliance, backup, and security awareness offerings, designed to support companies and organisations of all sizes globally.”

Are you feeling the sting of managing security requirements?

Contact one of our experts on 0345 345 1110 to discuss how we can help, or drop us an email: enquiries@lima.co.uk