In this Privacy Espresso, David Finz, author of the book “The Cyber Insurance Imperative” and Vice President of Cyber Risks at Alliant Insurance Services, explains what is cyber insurance and why is it important for any kind of company to adopt it.
Cyber insurance is a broad concept that today can be aligned to the activity of defending a company from claims involving some type of compromise of the data managed by the company, or a similar situation. All the costs of the people that can get involved in this process are part of a cyber insurance coverage.
The main requirements requested to gain cyber coverage today are much more sophisticated than before. This is because the laws and the related claims are becoming more and more complex so the level is getting higher. In general, the cyber insurance sector is witnessing the need for a culture of security, not only including physical protection means such as firewalls and technical security but also employees’ training within the companies. There is the need to instil a culture about acting to protect personal information as this is the only way to comply with the higher standards that are getting requested not only in the EU, but now also in the US. Embedding all of this is now necessary for the underwriters and the brokers’ job is also to ensure laws compliance.
Regarding the challenges, these have changed a lot. Initially, the data protected were mainly consumers’ data and the process was mainly focused o informing them about compromised data when something happened. Today, thanks to the GDPR but also to the recent US laws, there is an entire regime around protecting data and managing them. As these new regulations are appearing, one of the main issues now is to ensure that the companies’ policy wording is aligned to these new laws. The issue is that the cases we are facing are not any more focused on the type of data compromised only, but they also involve any other type of violation and lack of compliance with the regulations. For this reason, also the insurance coverage should now deal and include these new cases.
For viewers who are interested in learning more about how Alliant can help their business find the more rewarding way to manage risk, they can DM David on LinkedIn, or email him at [email protected]. You can also visit the Alliant website at www.alliant.com for more information about the full range of services they provide