Cyber Security Live: Could Your Business Survive a Cyber Attack?

2 Oct

Cyber Security Live: Could Your Business Survive a Cyber Attack?

Thursday 29 October 2026
9.30am–1.00pm
Holiday Inn Basildon, Festival Leisure Park

Hosted by Sunrise Technologies, with Essex Police, the Eastern Cyber Resilience Centre and Kaseya.

The event is free to attend and designed for businesses that want a clearer, more practical understanding of cyber security and resilience. The current event listing confirms the date, venue, partners and free attendance.

RESERVE YOUR FREE PLACE

Cyber security is easy to talk about when everything is working.

You can discuss phishing emails, backups, ransomware, multi-factor authentication, policies and security awareness. You can put protections in place, train your team and create plans for what you would do if something went wrong.

But what happens when it actually does?

On 29 October 2026, Sunrise Technologies is bringing businesses together at the Holiday Inn Basildon for Cyber Security Live: Could Your Business Survive a Cyber Attack?

And this year, we're taking things further.

Alongside Essex Police and the Eastern Cyber Resilience Centre (ECRC), we're being joined by Kaseya to bring another practical dimension to the day: a live cyber attack experience designed to put the realities of a serious cyber incident in front of the people attending. This isn't designed to be another morning of technical presentations.

We want businesses to experience cyber security differently.

Building on Last Year's Cyber Security Event

This isn't the first time we've brought the Essex business community together to talk about cyber security.

In 2025, Sunrise Technologies hosted a Cyber Security Awareness event in Basildon alongside Essex Police and the Eastern Cyber Resilience Centre. The event brought together business owners, IT professionals and members of the local community for a morning focused on understanding cyber risk in a practical and accessible way. And it worked. Rather than sitting through hours of technical terminology, attendees were encouraged to get involved.

The ECRC explored the cyber threat landscape and the practical steps organisations could take to protect themselves, while Essex Police delivered an interactive exercise that challenged attendees to think like a cyber criminal.

Participants worked in groups to investigate a mock cyber attack and discovered how apparently harmless pieces of information shared online — birthdays, names, interests and other personal details — could potentially be pieced together and used by criminals.

It created conversations.

People asked questions. Businesses compared experiences. And cyber security stopped being something happening somewhere inside an IT department and became something everyone in the room could understand. That's exactly what we wanted.

So for 2026, we're doing it again. But bigger.

Cyber Security Isn't Just an IT Problem

One of the biggest misconceptions surrounding cyber security is that it belongs entirely to the IT department. It doesn't. A serious cyber incident can affect almost every part of an organisation.

People may be unable to work. Systems can become unavailable. Customers may need to be contacted. Leadership teams may suddenly have decisions to make. Suppliers and partners could be affected. Data may need to be recovered. Communications have to be managed. And all of that can begin with something as simple as a convincing email, compromised account or overlooked vulnerability.

That's why this year's event is built around a much more direct question:

Could your business survive a cyber attack?

Not simply: Do you have cyber security?

Not: Do you have backups?

But if something happened tomorrow morning, how prepared would your organisation actually be?

Essex Police: Understanding the Information We Give Away

Essex Police will once again be joining us for the event. Their session will explore the use and protection of personal information before putting attendees to the test with an interactive, escape-room-style challenge. It's designed to demonstrate something that's remarkably easy to forget: information doesn't have to look sensitive to be useful to a criminal.

A single piece of information might appear insignificant. Combine it with other information, however, and the picture can look very different.

The session gives attendees an opportunity to explore that risk themselves rather than simply being told about it.

Understanding Today's Cyber Threats with the ECRC

We're also delighted to welcome back the Eastern Cyber Resilience Centre.

Sunrise Technologies has worked with the ECRC as a Community Ambassador since 2024, supporting its work to improve cyber resilience across the region.

At Cyber Security Live, the ECRC will look at the current cyber threat landscape and help businesses understand the practical steps they can take to reduce their exposure. Because good cyber security isn't necessarily about buying more technology.

It starts with understanding where your risks are.

NEW FOR 2026: Kaseya Joins Cyber Security Live

This year we're adding something completely new. Kaseya will be joining us to bring a live cyber attack experience to the room.

The aim is to move beyond talking about what a cyber incident looks like and start exploring the reality of responding when an organisation is under pressure.

What decisions need to be made?

Who needs to be involved?

How does a business respond when the situation is developing in front of them?

And what happens when attention turns from stopping an incident to actually getting the business operational again?

Kaseya brings an especially interesting perspective to that conversation. The technology company itself experienced a major ransomware supply-chain attack in 2021, an incident that affected managed service providers and their customers internationally. Contemporary reporting documented both the scale of the incident and Kaseya's response to it.

For us, that's what makes practical conversations around response and recovery so valuable. Cyber security isn't only about preventing something from happening. It's also about being prepared for what happens if it does.

Having a Backup and Being Able to Recover Aren't the Same Thing

Backups are a perfect example.

Asking “Do we have backups?” is useful.

But there are more important questions behind it.

When were they last tested? What exactly is being backed up? How quickly could critical systems be restored? Who would coordinate the recovery? Which systems would need to come back first?

Ultimately: If ransomware took your systems offline tomorrow, how confident are you that your business could recover?

That's the level of conversation we want businesses to leave Cyber Security Live thinking about.

No Technical Knowledge Required

Cyber Security Live isn't designed exclusively for IT professionals. In fact, we'd encourage business owners, directors, managers and people responsible for operations, finance, compliance and business continuity to attend.

You don't need to understand the technical workings of ransomware.

You need to understand what it could mean for your organisation.

Throughout the morning, specialists from Sunrise Technologies, Essex Police, the ECRC and Kaseya will help turn cyber security from an abstract technical subject into something practical. There will also be opportunities to ask questions, speak directly with the people involved and learn from other businesses attending.

Cyber Security Awareness Should Lead to Action

Cyber Security Awareness Month is useful because it gets businesses talking about security. But awareness alone doesn't make an organisation more secure. The real value comes from what happens afterwards. Perhaps you review who has access to your systems. Perhaps you test your backups. Perhaps you discover that your incident response plan hasn't been updated for years. Perhaps someone goes back to their team and starts a conversation about phishing. Or perhaps you simply leave knowing the questions you need to ask.

That's what we want from Cyber Security Live. Not fear. Not unnecessary technical jargon.

Better-informed businesses that are more prepared for when something goes wrong.