Decision-first scoping
Before a single test runs, we agree the decision the output will change — invest, divest, accept, fix. Birmingham engagements without a named decision-maker don't get past scoping. That discipline keeps work focused.
What manufacturing teams in Birmingham actually need from ai governance & risk isn't another vendor pitch — it's a senior consultant who's already worked the same threat profile elsewhere in United Kingdom. AI governance that engineering teams will actually use — model and dataset inventory, risk tiering, red-team requirements per tier, and approval workflows that do not become the AI bottleneck. Mapped to NIST AI RMF and ISO/IEC 42001 where it matters.
The manufacturing, finance concentration around Birmingham sees OT ransomware, manufacturing-line disruption and trade-secret IP theft. Our ai governance & risk work in West Midlands is scoped against this real threat profile, not a generic checklist.
Every finding ships with a control reference against NCSC Cyber Assessment Framework and UK GDPR, with NCSC UK guidance cited where it changes the remediation priority. Board reporting follows the FCA SYSC operational resilience expectation set.
Basalt delivers ai governance & risk to organisations across Birmingham and the wider West Midlands region (population ~2.6M). The manufacturing, finance sectors that anchor the region face a distinct threat profile — OT ransomware, manufacturing-line disruption and trade-secret IP theft — and our engagements are scoped to that, not a generic playbook. Reporting maps cleanly to the NCSC Cyber Assessment Framework and UK GDPR that British boards already use, with regulator context (NCSC UK) called out where it changes a remediation priority.
Before a single test runs, we agree the decision the output will change — invest, divest, accept, fix. Birmingham engagements without a named decision-maker don't get past scoping. That discipline keeps work focused.
Every finding is tagged against NCSC Cyber Assessment Framework and UK GDPR controls with NCSC UK guidance cited where it shifts a remediation priority. Your compliance team stops re-mapping our reports.
AI Governance & Risk doesn't end at the report. Basalt's Birmingham clients run retainer reviews on a quarterly cadence so the security posture compounds rather than drifting back six months after the engagement.
Cyber security in United Kingdom can't be done with last year's threat models. The Basalt practice runs against current attacker tradecraft — agentic AI abuse, MCP and AI-tool supply chain, post-quantum readiness — alongside the legacy infrastructure work that still keeps most organisations awake at night.
Most Birmingham engagements scope inside one week and start within two. Retainer clients can trigger work the same day. We do not pipeline British clients through junior teams — a senior consultant scopes and runs the work end-to-end.
Both. Sensitive work — classified-adjacent environments, live incident response, OT walkthroughs — gets on-site time in Birmingham and the wider West Midlands region. Routine assessments and detection engineering run remote with a tight feedback loop.
Every finding ships with a control reference against the NCSC Cyber Assessment Framework and UK GDPR so your compliance team is not re-mapping our report. Where NCSC UK guidance exists for the specific finding, we cite it inline. Board-level reporting follows the FCA SYSC operational resilience expectation set.
The manufacturing sector concentration in Birmingham drives a different threat model than a generic British engagement — OT ransomware, manufacturing-line disruption and trade-secret IP theft. Our scoping reflects that, and so does the test library we bring to the work.
Yes — this is core to how we work. Basalt actively researches and tests against agentic AI tool-abuse and indirect prompt injection at scale, MCP server and AI-tool supply chain compromise and identity-first attack chains across federated SaaS. Most regional providers haven't mapped these attack paths; we run them in production against client systems with explicit scope.
Strategic cyber security consulting
Adversarial testing for LLMs and AI systems
CREST-aligned penetration testing
Source code review and SAST/DAST integration