Insurance Not Enough To Counter Cyber Threats

Today, Lloyd’s of London issued a report that predicted a global cyber threat that could potentially trigger $53billion in economic losses. Andrew Clarke an EMEA Director at One Identity commented below.

Andrew Clarke, EMEA Director at One Identity:

 “As the world races forward consuming one technology break-through after another – each step along the road is often ignoring one of the most important factors and that is security.    And alongside security is regulation.   Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are one such example of the race spoken about by Elon Musk who fears that unregulated advances will not only create economic pressures through uncontrolled cyber attacks but in itself will also create a “fundamental risk to human civilisation”.   This illustrates a very valid point today though, just by insuring against the potential loss incurred by malicious cyber-originated activities is not enough – since in our connected world there really is no boundary that stops or even mitigates such a risk.

“With this situation, the financial impacts of a severe and laterally spreading cyber attack are huge – and without appropriate pro-active cyber defences, it could even wipe companies from the map.   How much would that cost in losses?  Business?  Brand-image? Jobs?   With recent high-profile examples, such as the Wannacry and NotPetya ransomware, we have only witnessed the tip of the ice-berg!

“As with AI, the world needs to be proactive with regulation and approach to business rather than always be reactive.   The regulation must enforce SMART decisions that ensure companies are best positioned to defend their own domain and call for the security fundamentals to be taken care of.    One way in which the industry is moving is that through the provision of required services through the cloud,  companies can access the applications and data that they need and the care and attention to protect their operation is handled by experts that do that job full-time and do have an armory of cyber defence tools at their disposal.   The risk passes onto a trusted third party, which as it their business to protect and mitigate risk is a much more viable proposition for insurance.”