3 Key Takeaways Regarding Optimal Cyber Insurance Coverage

• Understanding your business’s most crucial digital assets and mapping the vulnerabilities surrounding them is essential.
• The cyber insurance market continues to change, but more capacity is available and data standardization is becoming more common.
• Communicating your digital risk to your insurance broker and continuing to proactively address that risk are paramount for obtaining the best coverage at the best price year after year.

NetDiligence® President Mark Greisiger and SecondSight CEO Reuben Vandeventer discuss how companies can assess their cyber risk and accurately map digital vulnerabilities to become better candidates for cyber insurance coverage.

Reuben is also a founding member of d2.ai, Data Clairvoyance Group, and OpenMartech, and is a passionate advocate for businesses that understand how to leverage their data assets to facilitate growth in competitive industries.

Watch the video for the full discussion with Mark and Reuben; or read on for some of the highlights. This article is part of our continuing series of educational discussions with cyber risk management experts.

Digital Risk Story for Optimal Cyber Insurance Coverage

Understanding your cyber risk as a business is imperative for developing an effective cybersecurity strategy. However, it’s also essential for obtaining the best cyber insurance coverage. Insurance brokers benefit from understanding their clients’ digital risk landscape to provide more tailored coverage at better prices.

So how can companies identify their digital risk and communicate that information to insurance brokers? And how can companies go about managing cyber risk throughout the year to positively impact future coverage and policy options? Here, we discuss how to navigate your risks for optimal cyber insurance coverage.

Understanding Your Digital Risk as a Business

Managing cyber risk starts with understanding where your vulnerabilities are. It’s essential to identify the digital assets your business uses every day to produce revenue and cover its expenses. Once you understand these, you can start to ask yourself control questions like the ones the insurance market is asking for today. In doing so, you can have tailored remediation for the things the insurance industry is seeking.

Identifying your assets and vulnerabilities makes you a better candidate as an insurance client who is actively managing your risk and optimizing how quickly you can recover after a breach.

Communicating your business’s vulnerabilities to a cyber insurance company is paramount as well. To do this, the risk manager, CEO, CFO, and any other insured parties need to have installed equipment that is keeping them up to speed with the changes that happen daily in the digital dimension of the business.

Businesses that have an “always-on” mentality are always watching for changes. Therefore, they never get surprised by pivots in the insurance market. By monitoring their digital landscape, organizations can stay prepared for the insurance market’s requirements, priorities, and preferred coverage, enabling them to adapt accordingly to obtain optimal coverage.

Creating a Roadmap of Vulnerabilities

Once a business has identified its vulnerabilities, how do they create a roadmap before they even decide to apply for cyber coverage?

Every company, regardless of its size, needs to focus on the things that matter the most when it comes to cyber security and risk management. So, step one is understanding the digital assets your business depends on to stay operational and efficient. Really focusing your efforts on those particular assets allows you to create an accurate roadmap of the most significant vulnerabilities in your organization.

Then, using this roadmap, companies can continue to address and mitigate these vulnerabilities. By doing this and demonstrating these actions to the insurance company, they are accomplishing two things: strengthening security and optimizing their chances for the best cyber insurance coverage.

When organizations can tell a digital risk story, they demonstrate to insurance brokers that they are taking a proactive approach to risk management, which makes these companies more desirable insurance clients. They will be more likely to get substantially more coverage and much better rates along with optimized deductibles.

Additionally, creating a roadmap of vulnerabilities and a digital risk story allows companies to empower brokers to better advise them on specific policies based on risk for appropriate coverage, limits, and risk controls.

How Organizations Can Evaluate & Choose the Best Coverage

So, how would an organization that has identified its most important digital assets and created a roadmap go about evaluating and choosing the best cyber coverage based on its risk profile?

It really comes down to optimal coverage. There’s more capacity in the insurance market than there was two years ago, and submissions are normalizing, with questions and evidence becoming standardized. This standardization incentivizes businesses to collect information efficiently to determine all their insurance options.

By collecting as much information as possible, you make your business as marketable as possible for insurance brokers. This will help you get the best coverage and allow you to differentiate your business while helping your broker get you the right policy for your needs.

Adjusting Digital Risk Management Strategies Post-Bind

So, once you obtain optimal cyber insurance coverage, how can you go about managing cyber risk and continue monitoring your security?

This step is important because it allows businesses to not just fulfill the obligations of their current policy, but to make it easier to obtain coverage for next year.

It’s substantially easier to do insurance renewals if you are tracking all the progress and proactive behavior your organization is doing throughout the year. When you can track exactly when and how things happen, you’re collecting evidence of your always-on mentality.

As soon as you have your policy for the year, you should be planning for the next year by logging all the proactive behavior and measures your business is taking from a digital risk management standpoint. Actively managing risk even after obtaining coverage demonstrates a commitment to risk mitigation, which can appeal to underwriters and positively impact future coverage and policy options, and will result in better coverage options and rates.

Contact NetDiligence Today

NetDiligence empowers businesses with proactive cyber security and risk management solutions. Learn more about NetDiligence’s solutions for a rapidly changing cyber risk landscape. If you have questions for Mark, reach out to NetDiligence.

Learn more about SecondSight. If you have questions for Reuben, reach out to him at SecondSight.

Lastly, if you’re looking for a turnkey solution to help your organization adopt an incident response plan—a key element in any framework for improving critical cybersecurity infrastructure—get more information about Breach Plan Connect® from NetDiligence.