As Ireland prepares for NIS2 Directive, many SMEs and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are asking the same question: “Does this affect us — and if so, what do we actually need to do?”
The short answer is that NIS2 is not just a large-enterprise problem, and in Ireland it will have a very real effect for SMEs and therefore the MSPs that support them. To get businesses ready the Cyber Fundamentals standard is used by Ireland’s NCSC to provide a “structured, risk-based approach for essential and important entities to help entities organise and evidence their NIS2 security measures.”
This article explains how NIS2 and Cyber Fundamentals fit together in the Irish context, and what this means in practice for MSPs and their customers.
NIS2 in Ireland: Why SMEs are impacted
NIS2 is designed to protect consumers, businesses and supply chains from cyber threats by ensuring that organisations as well as technologies are continuously optimised to be cyber secure. While NIS2 formally targets Essential and Important entities, the reality is that many Irish SMEs will be affected indirectly as business ecosystem partners, even if they are not explicitly regulated.
This happens through:
- Supply chain requirements
Organisations in scope must assess and manage the cyber risk posed by suppliers and service providers. - Contractual pressure
SMEs are increasingly required to demonstrate baseline security controls to win or retain contracts. - Board-level accountability
NIS2 introduces explicit management responsibility, meaning cyber risk can no longer be ignored or delegated without oversight.
For MSPs, this creates a familiar challenge: translating regulatory language into clear, defensible actions that clients can understand and afford.
Cyber Fundamentals: A Practical Baseline for Ireland
In Ireland, Cyber Fundamentals provides a nationally recognised framework for demonstrating basic cyber security controls. It is not a full compliance regime, and it is not a replacement for NIS2 — but its a demonstration of cyber security maturity, and that is why it matters.
Cyber Fundamentals focuses on foundational controls, such as:
- Secure configuration
- Access controls
- Patch management
- Malware protection
- Backup and recovery
For many SMEs, this is the first time cyber security expectations are written down in a structured, auditable way.
Rather than treating Cyber Fundamentals as a tick-box exercise, MSPs can use it as:
- A baseline maturity marker
- A way to prove “reasonable measures” are in place
- A stepping stone toward NIS2-aligned governance and reporting
The SME and MSP challenge: Explaining NIS2 Compliance in a simple and straightforward way
Businesses, especially small ones, don’t want to be bogged down in compliance. Cyber Fundamentals needs to be easy and straightforward to show management and externals cyber security maturity in the business.
The difficulty lies in:
- Making NIS2 plain to understand
- Showing ongoing progress, not just one-off assessments
- Producing evidence without creating manual reporting overhead
Where Lupasafe Fits
Lupasafe is designed to support MSPs and SMEs in making NIS2 simple. It’s easy to deploy 60 minute set up provides a clear view of real cyber risks and compliance status, as well as the policies and training programmes to support them, and view progress in remediations.
In the context of NIS2 and Cyber Fundamentals, Lupasafe helps MSPs:
- Continuously monitor assets, domains, endpoints, and cloud environments
- Map technical findings to recognised control areas
- Generate clear, non-technical reports for management and auditors
- Support Cyber Fundamentals evidence without annual fire-drills
- Build toward NIS2 readiness without duplicating tools or effort
Instead of treating compliance as a once-a-year event, Lupasafe enables a continuous, defensible security posture that scales across multiple clients.
This works for Lupasafe clients in Ireland, and across the EU. SMEs get quick deployment from their MSPs for NIS2 certification – in industries such as manufacturing, healthcare, and financial services audit Lupasafe is making NIS2 easy for clients to get in control.
The Key Takeaway
Cyber Fundamentals helps Irish organisations show they are doing the basics right.
NIS2 raises expectations around governance, accountability, and resilience.
For MSPs, success lies in providing the data, training, and policies out of the box — using tools and processes that produce evidence as a by-product of normal security operations.
This is where practical compliance begins.
