Aged care leaders’ guide to building cyber readiness using the SMB1001 standard and Essential Eight compliance framework.
From November 2025, compliance with the ACSC Essential Eight Maturity Level 1 became a regulatory floor for residential aged care providers – not a “nice to have”.
At the same time, cyber security standards such as SMB1001 are emerging as practical, prescriptive frameworks for small and mid‑sized organisations that want to go beyond box‑ticking.
For boards and executives already stretched by funding pressures, workforce shortages and reform fatigue, another set of acronyms can feel like overload. Yet cyber incidents that disrupt care, expose sensitive records or trigger Notifiable Data Breach obligations are no longer hypothetical. They are now a core governance risk. The opportunity is to treat cybersecurity uplift in the same way you treat clinical quality or workplace safety: as a sequenced program with clear accountabilities, measurable outcomes and the right partners.
SMB1001 provides a prescriptive, annually updated standard that Microsolve has adopted internally and uses with clients under the SecureStart Advisory service. The Essential Eight provides a concise set of technical controls, with maturity levels and assessment guidance from the Australian Cyber Security Centre.
Together, these two complementary programs give aged care boards a practical way to turn “be more secure” into a specific, funded plan.
Boards need a shared view of current exposure: where critical systems sit (clinical, operational technology, communications, finance), which ones are already supported by managed or cloud services, and where legacy or bespoke platforms create outsized risk.
A high‑level cyber risk review, complemented by asset and dependency mapping for OT and IT, quickly surfaces hotspots. For residential aged care, these often include nurse call and building management systems, shared clinical workstations, and email and identity platforms that have grown organically over time.
From there, leadership can agree on objectives framed in business language:
These objectives anchor decisions about where to invest first and how fast to move, and they provide a narrative boards can communicate to residents, families and regulators.
The SMB1001 standard and the Essential Eight framework are not competing checklists; they are complementary lenses on the same problem.
To get real value, you need to map both to your organisation’s specific risks and operating model rather than treating them as abstract standards.
For residential aged care, that means starting with a clear picture of where harm could occur: operational disruption to care, exposure of sensitive resident data, fraud and financial loss, or regulatory sanction.
The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission’s technology and cyber security topic guide at Technology & cyber security topic guide frames technology as an enabler of safe, high‑quality care and sets clear expectations around governance.
With that lens, you can use SMB1001 to structure your foundation and the Essential Eight to harden key controls.
SMB1001’s five pillars – Technology Management, Access Control, Data Protection, Incident Response, and Staff Security Awareness – line up neatly with the Essential Eight’s focus on patching, application control, privilege management, multi‑factor authentication and backups.
For example, an SMB1001‑aligned Access Control practice will include clear decisions about identity providers, multi‑factor authentication coverage and joiner/mover/leaver processes.
Those same decisions determine your Essential Eight maturity for controls like multi‑factor authentication and restricting admin privileges.
Attacking CyberSecurity without a structured plan will only lead to frustration and failure. Starting with theoretical frameworks and endless reviews will not deliver pragmatic improvement in your security position. The approach that works best is a combination of pragmatic action with directed focus.
We recommend the following as the ideal approach once a baseline has been established:
The recommended roadmap uses the strengths of the SMB1001 program pragmatism and the depth of the Essential Eight framework to address the most problematic areas as a priority while guiding development of a cyber resilient culture throughout the organisation.
Required changes should be sequenced so they fit around major operational periods – for example, avoid major cutovers during accreditation visits or flu season – and ensure you have capacity to support staff through the transition.
As most sites rely on a network of vendors – from nurse call and CCTV to clinical software and connectivity – vendor governance must also be part of your mapping.
Ensure your vendor agreements/contracts and service definitions include suitable clauses that encourage partners to support your SMB1001 and Essential Eight objectives.
Ideally, each partner should be encouraged to regularly provide:
Microsolve’s own experience integrating multi‑site Wi‑Fi, OT and cloud services shows that when vendors work to a shared risk model, projects land faster and the residual risk profile is far better than ad‑hoc point fixes.
The quality of your governance will ultimately determine whether SMB1001 and Essential Eight uplift sticks.
Boards and executives need clear roles, regular reporting and reliable evidence – without drowning in technical detail. A useful pattern is to create a cyber risk and technology committee (or broaden an existing committee) that owns the roadmap, prioritises investments and monitors outcomes.
The committee should include clinical leadership alongside operations, finance and IT so that decisions about risk and trade‑offs are grounded in care realities, not just technology ideals.
Reporting should focus on a small set of leading and lagging indicators that line up with both SMB1001 and Essential Eight. Leading indicators might include multi‑factor authentication coverage, patch compliance, phishing simulation pass rates, backup restore success and the proportion of OT assets discovered and segmented. Lagging indicators could include cyber incidents per quarter, mean time to isolate suspected breaches, and unplanned outages affecting care.
Align these with the broader Aged Care Data and Digital Strategy 2024–2029, which emphasises secure, interoperable digital foundations; the strategy overview at About the Aged Care Data and Digital Strategy provides useful context. Critically, you need evidence that controls work under pressure.
Schedule regular tabletop exercises that combine cyber scenarios with clinical and operational stress – for example, a ransomware incident during a COVID outbreak, or a vendor outage affecting medication management. Use these to test not just your incident response plans but your communication pathways, decision‑making and ability to fall back to safe manual workarounds. Document lessons learned and track follow‑up actions in the same way you would for a clinical incident.
Finally, recognise that few providers can do this alone. A structured partnership with a vCIO or vCISO who understands both aged care and Australian cyber standards can accelerate your program and take pressure off internal leaders. They can help translate SMB1001 and Essential Eight requirements into sequenced projects, manage vendor alignment, and prepare board papers and evidence packs for regulators and auditors.
Combined with managed security services and recurring reviews, this creates a virtuous cycle: controls improve, evidence strengthens, and both boards and regulators gain confidence that cyber risk is being governed with the same discipline as clinical quality and financial performance.