Cyber insurance is an increasingly important aspect of overall risk management for many organizations. The role of cyber insurance has grown since the pandemic began, correlating with the rise in ransomware and the new reality that many cyberattacks are more sophisticated, better funded and, in some cases, backed by government sponsors.
The overall global cyber insurance market was estimated at $7.8 billion in 2020 and is expected to jump to more than $20 billion by 2025.1 In a world where concerns about the potential damage of cybersecurity breaches are growing, cyber insurance can help business leaders rest a little more comfortably.
It is important to understand that cyber insurance is only one aspect of a sound cyber risk strategy—it is not a cybersecurity control or a cyber resilience strategy. A cyber resilience strategy can ensure that an organization can continue operations, perhaps at reduced capacity, even in the face of ongoing attacks. In contrast, a cyber insurance policy can only pay for some costs tied to those attacks.
Working together, a cyber resilience strategy can reduce the total impact of an operational outage from several weeks to hours or days, and cyber insurance can pay for the costs of that recovery and any lost revenue while operational capacity was reduced. But having cyber insurance has no impact on getting your business back up and running.
Having a solid underlying cybersecurity plan to reduce overall cyber risk is not only the right business decision but also likely a prerequisite for even getting insurance at all or avoiding astronomically high premiums. As a TechTarget SearchSecurity article notes, cyber insurance premiums have increased upwards of 50%, with some quotes jumping closer to 100%.2
In the article, a lead cybersecurity strategist at accounting firm Schneider Downs says providers are now including “prerequisites that shift focus toward prevention by enforcing basic controls such as multifactor authentication.” The strategist adds, “By not insuring organizations that fail to comply with the most basic cybersecurity controls, providers can drastically reduce their exposure to risk.”
The broad, end-to-end cyber resiliency portfolio of solutions from Dell Technologies and VMware provides organizations of all sizes with the cybersecurity framework and foundation to maximize the value of cyber insurance in risk management, while adhering to the prerequisites that most policies require.
With a comprehensive cyber resilience plan, organizations can take advantage of layered, in-depth, end-to-end intrinsic security and secure cloud architecture to lower risk with modern capabilities to protect, detect, respond and recover. Prerequisites include:
- Extensive automation across the security environment, making it easier for SOC teams to deploy security, be proactive in enforcing security controls and respond to threats as they evolve, using intelligent threat monitoring and modern extended disaster recovery technologies.
- A full suite of solutions to protect users and endpoints, which is particularly important as more people work from home or in hybrid word environments. See related article: 5 Ways to Maximize Cyber Resiliency to Support Hybrid Work
- An end-to-end approach to network security, using technologies such as VMware NSX, SD-WAN and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), as well as zero trust architectures, to mitigate risk and empower the changing workforce.
- Modern data protection, backup and recovery solutions that use automation and intelligence to isolate critical data, identify suspicious activity and accelerate data recovery. These capabilities help organizations quickly resume normal business operations after an attack, while limiting the impact of ransomware and other destructive data attacks.
- Deployment flexibility, with the ability to leverage as-a-service models such as Dell Technologies Cyber Recovery Services. This helps the organization stay current with security innovations, create a “minimum viable company” and mitigate overall cyber risk, which allows insurance providers to minimize their own risk in offering coverage or setting prices for premiums.
Taking the Next Step
Building an end-to-end cyber resilience approach from data center to edge to cloud provides the foundation for your organization to determine the best, most cost-effective way to incorporate cyber insurance as a key element of your overall risk management posture.
The right strategy will help you get the right insurance for your organization, and it will help you manage overall risk management and costs. For more information on how to maximize cyber resiliency and mitigate risk, please visit Dell Technologies.
1 “Cyber Insurance Statistics,” Security.org, Dec. 3, 2021
2 “Cyber Insurance Premiums, Costs Skyrocket as Attacks Surge,” TechTarget SearchSecurity, Oct. 11, 2021
