How The Right GRC Program Can Help You Get Cyber Insurance

When you buy a new house, your mortgage lender wants to know that you have homeowner’s insurance in case of any damage. Your homeowner’s policy is there to protect you when you have a water incident, a small fire, or any other catastrophe that can cost big money.

When your company deals with data from customers and clients, cyber insurance is there for the same reason: to pick up the pieces if a cybersecurity incident occurs and help your org get back on its feet. The right cyber insurance policy could help you cover the costs associated with regulatory fines, lawsuits, and other consequences of a cyberattack. Cyber insurance can be an important safety net for any company that conducts business online—which, these days, is just about every company. 

The catch is that because cyber insurance is such a new concept, settling on levels of coverage and rates isn’t always a straightforward process and finding the right policy for a fair price can be challenging. The trick to getting a better rate is to be able to prove to insurers that you’re doing everything you can to keep your cyber house in order and fend off any threats. The best way to do that is by having a solid, holistic GRC program in place.

Let’s look at why cyber insurance is still a must-have, why it can be so tricky to obtain, and how good GRC can help you get a better cyber insurance policy for your money.

Why cyber insurance is so important

You know that a single cyberattack can cripple your business or put you at risk of: 

• Real damage to your customers
• Legal trouble and hefty fines
• Reputational damage that can be difficult — if not impossible — to repair

Meanwhile, bad actors are broadening their attacks and becoming more sophisticated. New risk vectors pop up every day in the digital world, and the frequency of attacks is only rising. 

Cyber insurance alone won’t prevent cyberattacks, but a solid policy can help you recover from an attack more quickly. Most policies cover the costs of rebuilding your IT infrastructure, legal fees, regulatory fines, and other big-ticket expenses that might otherwise paralyze your business.

The state of cyber insurance — and how it affects your business

Cyber insurance can give you peace of mind, but getting insured isn’t as simple as it seems. The insurance industry determines premiums based on historical data. For example, if you’re buying a house, the insurer looks at historical fire, earthquake, and weather data to determine your risk level and your premiums. 

But that type of information isn’t always available with cyber insurance. This is a dynamic market where things change at the speed of technology. That means insurers often don’t have enough information to determine fair premiums. There’s so much uncertainty around cyber risks that insurers tend to charge more to cover themselves.

Pay less for cyber insurance with a GRC platform

The good news: You can help your cyber insurer set the right — and, preferably, lower — rate for your organization by providing them with more detailed information about your cybersecurity posture and the risks facing your business through your GRC program.

Having the right GRC platform in place enables you to serve up the data and information required to prove that your business has a strong cybersecurity posture to a cyber insurer. These platforms help you collate your information, collect evidence of any attacks, show how you’re working to prevent them, and assess your risk ahead of an attack. 

Bring information into one location

GRC platforms can help you visualize, track, manage, and minimize your cyber risk all in one central dashboard. You can use real-time updates to provide your cyber insurer with an accurate snapshot of your cyber risk landscape and information about all of the controls you have in place to manage your cyber risk. 

While your business needs these controls to lock down your cyber infrastructure, insurers like to see things like: 

• SSL certificates
• Multi-factor authentication
• Robust employee background checks
• Sound employee onboarding and offboarding policies

With the proper controls in place — and proof that they’re in place readily available — you're in a better position to pay less for quality cyber insurance.

Automatically collect evidence

Being able to automatically collect evidence that you can turn over to an insurer also smooths out the process of obtaining cyber insurance, saves resources for your org, and can result in lower rates. Instead of asking your engineers to waste their time and effort on tedious evidence collection, your GRC platform can do it all for you. 

For example, you can tell an insurer that you require multi-factor authentication (MFA) on all accounts. But is that actually true? Your GRC platform can automatically serve up the attestation you need to show an insurer that everyone is in compliance with your controls.

Quantify cyber risk

There’s arguably no better way to prove to insurers exactly what they’re getting into when agreeing to extend a policy to your organization than to show them the precise financial impact of the various cyber risks you expect to face.

With risk quantification, you can tie hard numbers to each of your cyber risks to illustrate their true financial impact. Using a GRC platform that includes risk quantification features makes this much easier. These capabilities enable you to  evaluate different scenarios to give cyber insurers peace of mind. They can also help you obtain buy-in for pursuing cyber insurance from leadership by empowering you to have more intelligent conversations about your cyber risk landscape and why it pays to invest in cyber insurance.

Having this deep level of context around your cyber risks can help make sure you’re investing in the controls that a cyber insurer is more likely to care about, making the most of your resources while saving money on cyber insurance premiums.

Overcome cyber risks with better data

Cyber risk is still a relatively new frontier for insurers, and the more comfortable you can make your potential insurer with your cybersecurity practices, the greater your chances are of scoring a quality policy at a fair rate. Request a demo today to see how it works.