Welcoming Surpass Assessment as a New Client

Priority Pixels are pleased to be working with Surpass Assessment, an international leader in computer-based testing technology for secure, high-stakes examinations. Headquartered in West Yorkshire and operating since 1985, the Surpass Platform powers test authoring, delivery, marking and reporting for awarding bodies, professional associations, universities and regulators across the world. Members of the Surpass Community use the platform to run end-to-end assessment programmes, from item development through to candidate results and analytics.

We’re supporting Surpass with ongoing WordPress support and maintenance across a multi-website estate, that sits behind the main domain. The work covers core, theme and plugin updates, security monitoring and routine health checks on every website, alongside WordPress development support for new features and improvements.

Security discipline matters more here than on a typical WordPress engagement. Surpass sits behind high-stakes examinations for awarding bodies, universities and regulators, and the business operates to ISO 27001 for information security. A public WordPress estate that sits alongside that regulated environment has to be maintained to a standard that matches, not one that lags behind it. That means patched quickly on advisories, monitored continuously, hardened against the common WordPress attack surface and kept fully in step with the wider security posture the business runs against every day.

That is the discipline the maintenance engagement is built around. Predictable update windows, tested patches, documented change trails and a rollback plan for every deployment. The output is an estate the internal security team can look at and see behaving the way the rest of the regulated stack behaves, without the WordPress side becoming the weakest link.

It’s a good example of the kind of work we do for technology businesses, lifting the ongoing operational burden of WordPress maintenance off the in-house team so they can focus on the platform work that drives the business forward.