We build one thing, and we supply a few others.

Ceidwad is Welsh for guardian. Ceidwad Limited does two things for UK schools, trusts and colleges, and it is worth being precise about which is which — because they are different jobs, and one of them checks the other.

Ceidwad Atlas — the platform we build

Atlas shows a school where it stands, what to fix first, and produces the evidence a governing body, an insurer or the DfE will ask for. It checks what is visible from outside — your email protection, your website, your Microsoft 365 posture — and turns it into plain English and a dated record.

Atlas is not security software. Nothing in it blocks, detects or responds to an attack, and we won’t pretend otherwise. It sits alongside whoever runs your IT; it does not replace them, and it does not replace the controls below.

The controls we supply

Separately, Ceidwad Limited supplies products built by established vendors — backup and recovery, endpoint protection, filtering and monitoring, networking. We didn’t write those; we resell them, because a school that has just been told what to fix first usually wants one supplier to fix it with, rather than four procurement exercises.

We name the vendor on the quote, never before it — we won’t put a logo on a website for a partnership that isn’t signed. Ask us and you’ll get the actual name, the actual price, and what we make on it.

Doing both is a conflict. Here is how we handle it.

Selling you a control and then assessing whether your controls work is a conflict of interest. Pretending otherwise would be worse than having it, so:

• Atlas findings are vendor-neutral, permanently. A finding tells you what is wrong. It never names a product we happen to sell as the answer, and it never scores you worse for using somebody else’s.
• Any recommendation touching something we supply says so, in the recommendation. Not in a footnote.
• You can buy either half on its own. Plenty of schools will take Atlas and buy their controls elsewhere, or buy a product from us and never touch Atlas. Neither is priced to punish the other.

We are new, and we would rather say so

Ceidwad Limited is a young company. We do not have a wall of customer logos, and putting one up would be the first dishonest thing on this site. What we can offer instead is the thing schools actually need from a supplier they have not heard of: published prices, a free assessment that gives you a plain-English plan whether or not you ever pay us, and a clear account of what we do and don’t do.

Everything here is built for the way schools actually work — a business manager with an hour, an IT lead who wears ten hats, a governing body that meets termly and needs something it can read. That is a narrower brief than most security vendors set themselves, and it is deliberate.

Where your data sits

Core platform data at rest is hosted in Microsoft Azure UK South. Some processing — including the AI that drafts plain-English explanations — runs on Microsoft’s global infrastructure, so we don’t claim everything stays in the UK. We don’t hold pupil data: connecting a management information system is optional, priced separately, and reads staff details only. Our security page sets out the detail, and our privacy notice names every sub-processor.

The company