Designing Proportionate Cybersecurity Frameworks for European Micro-Enterprises: Lessons from the Squad 2025 Case

Micro and small enterprises (SMEs) account for most European businesses yet remain highly vulnerable to cyber threats. This paper analyses the design logic of a recent European policy initiative -- the Squad 2025 Playbook on Cybersecurity Awareness for Micro-SMEs -- to extract general principles for proportionate, resource-aware cybersecurity governance. The author participated in the Squad 2025 team and originally proposed the seven-step preventive structure that later shaped the Playbook's design, subsequently refined collaboratively within the project. The framework was guided by the author's design premise that raising cybersecurity awareness among micro- and small-enterprise actors represents the most efficient short-term lever for increasing sensitivity to cybercrime and promoting protective behaviours. Without reproducing any proprietary material, the paper reconstructs the conceptual architecture of that approach within the broader context of ENISA guidance, ISO 27005, and the NIS2 Directive. It proposes a generic seven-dimension preventive model suitable for micro-enterprise adoption and discusses implications for policy transfer, awareness training, and maturity assessment.