Companies who outsource need to 'cover all bases' of cyber risk

Insurance expert delves into new coverage requirements in the cyber sphere

Companies who outsource need to 'cover all bases' of cyber risk

Cyber

By Bethan Moorcraft

The business world is evolving at a rapid pace. As innovation triumphs and consumer demands develop, more and more companies are turning to third-party providers to help them stay on top of the game.

Companies who choose to outsource their vital operations to external service providers are stuck in a susceptible position when it comes to cyber liability insurance. At present, there’s little guaranteed protection for enterprises who experience loss as a result of a third-party systems failure.

NAS Insurance Services has introduced various new updates to its cyber suite to address current gaps in the burgeoning cyber market. The company’s senior vice president of marketing, Jeremy Barnett will be discussing exciting updates to cyber coverage components in our exclusive webinar ‘State of the Art Cyber: New Risks, Expanded Coverages, Essential Services’ being held later this month.

“One of our big new products is called Dependent Systems Failure coverage, which extends coverage for business interruption caused by systems failure, to third parties,” Barnett told Insurance Business. “If a business is dependent on a third-party provider, like a web-hosting company or a cloud services company, and their systems go down, this Dependent Systems Failure coverage will help cover that business interruption loss. People are outsourcing more and more of their vital operations, and they need protection for if those third-party operations go down.

“Today, companies can get insurance for internal system failures, but it doesn’t often extend to third-party system failures. Organizations have to hope the company they hired has insurance, and then sue them for whatever their negligence may have been. There may be some long-term mitigation and financial compensation, but that could all take a lot of time to sort out.”

Another way businesses can become more cyber literate is by thinking beyond pre-breach mitigation and breach response, to planning for post-breach remediation costs, according to Barnett. NAS Insurance’s new Post Breach Remediation Costs update pays for post-breach consulting to help companies mitigate the potential of future breach.

“An effective cyber insurance or cyber risk management approach is a combination of a state-of-the-art insurance policy and a suite of cyber security services,” Barnett said. “The industry has made a lot of progression in terms of value-added services in pre- and post-breach areas, but now we need to prepare companies to help mitigate the potential of a future breach after something happens. It’s about covering all bases.”

Barnett will be diving into the intricacies of cyber risk mitigation in the ‘State of the Art Cyber: New Risks, Expanded Coverages, Essential Services’ webinar on March 29. He will be joined by a panel of experts to discuss pre-breach services, cyber risk management best practices, and exciting updates on new 2018 cyber coverage components.

 

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