Why is My Insurance Provider Asking About My Cybersecurity?

You may have noticed that business insurance companies are starting to get interested in your technology and how you secure it. We’re going to unpack this and help you make informed decisions on how to handle your IT and how to prevent your insurance costs from skyrocketing.

My Business Insurance Company Wants Me to Answer Cybersecurity Questions

We’ve been getting questions about this a lot lately. As more and more businesses have become reliant on digital technology, and as cyberthreats continue to rise and get more dangerous, business insurance companies are now requiring their clients to meet specific standards in order to mitigate these risks. Businesses that fail to do so may see higher insurance costs, or may not qualify for coverage, so it’s pretty important in that regard.

Right now, every insurance firm is handling this a little bit differently, but generally they are all looking for roughly the same thing. We’ll go over this in more detail shortly. The difference is how well-equipped your representative at the insurance agency is at explaining these regulations. They probably aren’t very technical, and are probably just doing the best they can.

On top of that, they have no idea what is already in place at your business, and every business is going to be pretty unique when it comes to a lot of this stuff. This makes everything all the more confusing and complicated.

We’ve had clients come to us thinking that their insurance company was strictly worried about the security of their website, or they felt their insurance provider was claiming that their business (which we were helping meet strict HIPAA guidelines) wasn’t secure. It’s a very confusing situation for a lot of business owners, and we are more than happy to offer guidance. If you are concerned about this, we encourage you to reach out to AccessMSP at (888) 548-9511.

How Do I Meet My Business Insurance Provider’s Cybersecurity Requirements?

The goal is to reduce risk and minimize your vulnerability to cyberthreats. Your insurance provider wants you to take some basic steps to protect your data, especially data involving employees, customers, and prospects. 

There are a lot of different kinds of cybersecurity threats out there these days, and many of them cause major downtime, incur costs, and can damage your organization’s reputation. Your insurance provider wants to make sure you are taking steps to protect yourself.

Your insurance provider likely provided you with a list of questions. These usually cover most of the following:

• Web security and firewalls
• Secured, encrypted data backups
• Strong password policies
• Multi-factor authentication
• Email filtering and spam protection
• Endpoint detection and response (EDR)
• Vulnerability management
• Security awareness training and testing

Depending on your industry and the type of information you work with, there may be other requirements. For example, if you are in the financial industry or you work with health and medical data, you already have strict regulations to meet.

Don’t Do This for the Sake of the Insurance Company

Sure, it makes perfect sense to take action to reduce the cost of your insurance. However, you shouldn’t focus on the cost analysis of what it will cost to implement versus what it will save you over time on insurance. Instead, look at this as an opportunity to do the right thing for your business. 

Forget the savings on your insurance—consider just how much a cybersecurity attack could end up costing your business. Even for smaller businesses, a bad ransomware attack can cost thousands and thousands of dollars. That number can scale to the tens, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars over time. Businesses can lose a lot of time when dealing with these, and the amount of effort it takes to recover is extremely high.

On top of that, many of these requirements don’t necessarily equate to throwing a lot of money at the problem—some of it will require investing in software or hardware, but most of the time it’s more about training, setting policies, and making small internal changes.

Let’s Look at Your Business Insurance Cybersecurity Requirements Together

We’ve been helping businesses throughout south and eastern Florida make sense of these new insurance requirements, and we help businesses meet some of the strictest cybersecurity guidelines, so AccessMSP can definitely help. 

If you have questions about your cybersecurity, give us a call today at (888) 548-9511.