In our last blog, we explored cyber insurance’s importance today, how it works, and why premiums are rising and coverage is decreasing in the industry. We also explored how your business can remain eligible for cyber insurance and access lower insurance premiums, by lowering the risk it presents through investments in cybersecurity.
In this piece, we give you an outline of the measures you can take to consolidate your cyber security posture. But first, let’s explore why combining investments in cybersecurity and cyber insurance can offer excellent benefits for your business.
Why You Should Invest in Cyber Insurance and Cyber Security for Your Business
We believe that every business should be as prepared as possible in today’s world. While a robust cyber security posture can greatly decrease the probability and potential impact of successful cyber-attacks in your business, having cyber insurance that you know you can claim back successfully following an incident, offers a substantial cushion that assures a minimum of damage and disruption for your business. But you can ask, if there are already robust defenses in place, why invest in cyber insurance?
Cyber-attack attempts are now a daily reality for many businesses, and as a business grows, the number of potential vulnerabilities it has increases, and with its growth, so too does its lucrativeness to cyber criminals. National government bodies and large corporates are not impregnable fortresses, as news of cyber-attacks shows, and neither are many of the smaller businesses that don’t reach the headlines.
This, coupled with the growing number of cyber threat actors, the damage they can cause, and the scalability and sophistication of their tools, is increasingly bringing Murphy’s law to the front door of businesses – what can happen, will happen given enough chances. This is why we see combining cybersecurity with cyber insurance as a best practice.
Cybersecurity minimizes the risk of attacks and their impact and will prevent a very large number of cyber threats from compromising your business. Combined with cyber insurance, in the event of an attack your business will have highly reduced losses, while the robust cybersecurity posture you’ve invested in, will help to ensure that your claim and payout is accepted, and that throughout your insurance engagement, the premiums that you pay are low.
Autosecure: Systematize Your Cybersecurity and Access Lower Premiums, For Just $995
What if your business could systematically elevate its cybersecurity posture and reliably automate a range of its cybersecurity measures, ensuring it is always operating cyber securely and compliantly? Our Autosecure Configuration and Automation package enables businesses to achieve these goals, shoring up their cybersecurity, lowering premiums, and assuring that if an incident happens, the claim will not be rejected due to breach of warranty. Gain peace of mind and maximum protection for your business. Contact us today to access this limited-time offer.
How to Stay Eligible for Cyber Insurance and Lower Your Premiums
There is a simple guiding principle here: the lower the risk that your business presents, the more likely it is to be eligible for cyber insurance and lower premiums. So, how do you do this? By investing in cybersecurity and demonstrating a robust cyber security posture to insurers.
Cyber insurance provider will look at your business’s cyber defenses and risk profile, paying particular attention to some key factors:
- The defensive measures you have in place for your network, users, devices, applications and infrastructure.
- Your business’s size and nature, the volume and sensitivity of the data it handles, and its regulatory environment.
- Past cyber incident history.
- Third-party relationships, such as data sharing agreements with other organizations.
Ensuring cybersecurity measures are consistently implemented, is also highly relevant for ensuring that cyber insurance claims are accepted following an incident. A cyber insurance provider may reject a claim for:
- Breaching warranty; the defenses that were agreed to be in place under the insurance contract were found to not be in place.
- Demonstrable negligence being a factor in the cause of the incident.
- Late reporting of breach events and attacks.
- Failures in mitigating damages after the incident.
Investing in cyber security measures and processes can greatly help your business to avoid these grounds for rejecting claims, which also help your business to lower the risks and damages of cyber incidents in general. Here’s how to consolidate your cyber security posture to reduce premiums and ensure that your business can successfully claim in the event of a cyber incident.
Key Cybersecurity Measures for Lower Cyber Insurance Premiums
The key to staying eligible for cyber insurance, lowering premiums and getting successful payouts, is lowering the risk factors that your business presents as much as possible.
Cyber insurance providers will look at the technical, human and organizational defenses that you have in place. They will look at how these reduce risk in terms of the probability and immediate impact of incidents, as well as how much your measures will mitigate avoidable recovery costs following the incident.
Here are the measures you can implement to achieve these goals:
Preventive Measures
These measures prevent breaches and unauthorized access from cyber threats. These include:
- Firewalls
- Antivirus software
- Patch management solutions
- User access controls
- Multi-Factor Authentication
Implementing these measures lowers the chances of cyber incidents occurring and attenuates the amount of damage that they can cause.
Detection Measures
A second layer, these measures focus on detecting suspicious activity, intrusions and breaches, these include:
- Intrusion detection systems (these also can be combined with prevention systems)
- Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions
- Network monitoring tools
- Security Operations Centre (SOC) solutions
Applying these measures lowers the potential damage that any breaches or malicious activity inside of your network can cause by identifying them as soon as possible. They can also help you to trace the root causes of them so that you can prevent these incidents from occurring again.
Responsive Measures
These defenses respond directly to detected anomalies and threats to counteract them. They include:
- Intrusion prevention systems (these also can be combined with detection systems)
- Incident response plans
- Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR)
- Endpoint detection and response
Armed with the intelligence from your detection measures, these responsive measures lower cyber risks by combatting threats before they can cause serious harm to your business.
Recovery Measures
These measures focus on efficiently and effectively getting a business back up and operational following an incident. The more effective the measures are here, the lesser degree of risk in terms of damages that the business presents to cyber insurance companies:
- Data backup & recovery tools and plans
- System restoration tools
- Redundancy measures (duplicate data stores and systems that can be activated)
- Business continuity plans
These measures lower the cost-risks for cyber insurance providers; it’s not good for either party to spend more time and money on recovery than is needed.
Final Thoughts
Despite higher premiums and some providers reducing their cyber insurance offerings, the market is growing but is also consolidating itself within a very dynamic cyber landscape. In the meantime, businesses can get the best out of this situation by investing in cyber defenses. This will enable your business to access the best of both worlds: it will have the immediate security and insurance of bolstered defenses, but also because of these, it will have a cost-effective safety cushion in the form of cyber insurance, that it can rely on should a damaging incident occur.
Making this a reality involves implementing cybersecurity measures in your business systematically and ensuring they work consistently. This all comes together into industry-grade protection that gives peace of mind, robust business continuity, and the ability for your business to firmly stay on its track towards growth and success.
CP Cyber: Industry Leaders in Cybersecurity
We’re established leaders in the provision of cybersecurity solutions to businesses of a range of sizes, including large enterprises. No two businesses are the same, and neither are our cybersecurity solutions. We bring the capability that you need to identify and address vulnerabilities within your business, and threats that could compromise it, and use these insights to secure your business. Don’t just take it from us, see what our customers have to say.
Want to create an industry-leading cybersecurity posture for your business? Book a meeting with us today. We’d be glad to meet you, listen to your needs, and offer empowering insights and guidance.
