There is a saying ‘it’s better to be safe than sorry’!  

Taking adequate risk preventive measures is always better and safer than reacting to cyber threats. Today, the nature of cybercrime is too sophisticated, and it possesses an uncanny ability to inflict damage by exploiting security vulnerabilities at any point. Not just organized cyber criminals but also malicious insides pose bigger threats to organizations continuously. 

In almost every industry, large and mid-scale organizations have faced financial turmoil due to non-compliance penalties or loopholes in complying with IT standards. That is why demand for cyber insurance has been at an all-time high in the last few years. However, it can never be a replacement for robust security controls and practices. An organization is better positioned to qualify for a cyber insurance policy if it has robust cybersecurity mechanisms and controls. Because the higher and stronger the IT security infrastructure and policy, the lower is the insurance premium. 

What and Why of Cyber Insurance 

Cyber insurance, also known as cyber liability insurance or cybersecurity insurance, protects businesses from financial losses caused by various cyber incidents.  

The demand and importance of cyber insurance is growing increasingly as third-party partners and customers require cyber insurance coverage as a primary condition of doing business. This stringent requirement has made cyber insurance not just an option but a mandatory necessity for many organizations. Both parties understand that cyber risk is eventually business risk. Measures to mitigate such risks are cross-functional, especially when it comes to risk transfer via cyber insurance. 

According to Forrester’s Security Survey report, 2023 – 

“18% of global enterprise security decision-makers view the acquisition of cyber insurance as a top strategic priority over the next 12 months” 

“83% of enterprise security technology decision-makers have cyber insurance coverage today.” 

Now the question is why has there been an INCREASING DEMAND for cyber insurance in the recent past? Some reasons are: 

• Financial Protection: It helps to cover the costs associated with cyber incidents, such as data breaches, ransomware attacks, phishing attacks and other cybercrimes. This includes expenses for legal fees, notification costs, and recovery efforts. 

• Business Continuity: Cyber insurance can provide resources to help a business quickly recover from a cyber incident, minimizing downtime and IT operational disruptions. 

• Risk Management: Having cyber insurance encourages businesses to adopt better cybersecurity practices. Insurers often require policyholders to implement certain predefined security measures, which can reduce the probability of any cyber incident. 

• Regulatory Compliance: Many industries have regulatory compliance standards that require businesses to follow mandatory clauses and protect sensitive data. Cyber insurance can cover compliance costs and any penalties resulting from a breach. 

• Reputation: A cyber incident can damage a company’s reputation. Cyber insurance often includes coverage for public relations efforts to manage and mitigate reputational harm. 

In a nutshell, cyber insurance acts as a safety net, providing financial and operational support in the event of a cyber incident. It helps businesses manage the complex and evolving landscape of cyber risks. 

Now, the question is – what is the best bet to ensure lower cyber insurance premiums? 

To build robust cybersecurity controls and practices, organizations bank on the best solutions that detect vulnerabilities, mitigate threats, and comply with regulatory standards. Implementing Privileged Access Management (PAM) strengthens the foundation for a robust identity and access management (IAM) framework. It offers key security components to monitor end-user activities, build secure access mechanisms, safeguard privileged accounts and confidential information and comply with regulations. 

According to 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Privileged Access Management report,  

“Cybersecurity insurers require clients to have a strategy for managing privileges in their environment…  Clients should expect cybersecurity insurers to continue to scrutinize how privileged access is managed, in return for an insurance policy or lower premiums.” 

ARCON | Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution, in this backdrop, not only ensures secured access in the enterprise network but also helps IT administrators accomplish their tasks efficiently and on time. The flexibility of the overall business process and the reliability of the stakeholders determine the extent of IT agility the organization has. It plays a crucial role in maintaining lower cyber insurance premiums by enhancing an organization’s security posture. Here’s how: 

• Reducing Risk of Data Breaches: ARCON PAM helps control and monitor access to critical systems and data, reducing the risk of unauthorized access and potential breaches. Insurers often favor organizations with strong access controls. 

• Compliance with IT Standards: Implementing ARCON PAM can help to comply with the regulatory mandates and IT standards for cybersecurity. Compliance with these standards can lead to lower premiums, as it demonstrates a commitment to robust security practices. 

• Incident Response: ARCON PAM includes features for monitoring and auditing privileged access. This helps to identify and respond to suspicious activities quickly, minimize the impact of a breach, and potentially lower the cost of claims. 

• Enhanced Security Measures: By enforcing the principle of least privilege, ARCON PAM ensures that users only have role-based access to critical information assets and necessary resources. This reduces the attack surface and the possibility of insider threats that can positively influence insurance premiums. 

• Demonstrating Proactive Security: Insurers prefer to cover organizations that take proactive steps to manage cyber risks. Implementing ARCON PAM shows that a company is serious about streamlining its IT operations and protecting its sensitive data and systems, which helps with more favorable insurance terms. 

Conclusion 

In summary, PAM helps organizations strengthen their security framework, making it less risky to insure. This can result in lower cyber insurance premiums and better protection against cyber threats. 

Cyber risks businesses face

Businesses face a variety of cyber risks every day, including network failures, malware infections, cyber extortion demands, ransomware, and data breaches. Digital identities are the most common attack vector, but many businesses are unaware of just how vulnerable their many unique digital identities are. Some cyber insurance companies have even mandated Privileged Access Management (PAM) technology to obtain cyber insurance.

Cyber liability insurance can include identity protection, but there are more steps businesses can take to protect the digital identities of their employees and devices. ARCON’s solutions create a digital fence around your core digital infrastructure to protect these digital identities and secure your digital assets. The cost of cyber insurance can be significantly reduced if they have ARCON’s technology deployed. We can also provide extensive insight into your data so you know what you have, what is important, where it lives, and when it moves. This ensures you’re always protecting the most contextually important pieces of information and can follow its trail should it ever move.

These threats businesses face become more complex and sophisticated by the day, making it not a question of if your organization will be threatened or suffer a breach but when. This fact highlights the need for cyber security insurance that protects against these evolving threats. Combined with cyber liability insurance, a comprehensive plan and secure identity management solutions from ARCON allows businesses of any size and in any industry to mitigate cyber risk and achieve security compliance. In addition to increasing security, these measures can also increase productivity.

Protect your business with ARCON solutions

While it’s true that larger corporations face more risk and have more areas of vulnerability, cyber insurance for small businesses – even mom and pop shops – is still important. ARCON understands the complexity of cyber threats facing businesses small and large, and we have the solutions that help ensure data and other important business assets are protected.

Request a demo today to see our privileged access management solutions in action!

Good health is a priceless asset! To stay healthy and fit, more and more people ensure health hygiene. In short, we don’t mind footing increasing healthcare bills as maintaining health hygiene helps to avoid incurring bigger unforeseen health-related expenses. 

Similarly, for modern organizations, cyber hygiene is desirable. 

Organizations adopt adequate IT security measures and policies to ensure a ‘healthy’ IT environment. There are several attributes of cyber hygiene that ensure IT security safeguards of a digital infrastructure. This requires continuous assessment of the security policies and mechanisms. 

Nevertheless, the question is, how many organizations regularly conduct assessment of IT security preparedness to ensure a safe and ‘healthy’ IT environment? 

Even though there is an assessment, are the organizations adopting adequate IT security measures to ensure a secured IT environment? Shockingly, however, 40% of global business organizations spend nothing or are under-invest to secure their information assets from cyber threats.

5 Reasons why today’s Organizations need ARCON | UBA

Cyber Hygiene and IT Risk Mitigation 

Cyber hygiene is nothing but the security practices that maintain IT systems’ health and improve cybersecurity. These routine practices ensure the security of digital identities, safe access control mechanisms, continuous monitoring of end-users and other safety practices like network security. 

Cyber hygiene wards off IT threats like:

• Data breach
• Loss of data privacy
• Malicious end-user activities
• Anomalous end-user behaviour
• Cyber espionage
• Unauthorized access
• Insider threats
• Misuse of elevated access rights
• Non-compliance to the global standards

Cyber hygiene does not necessarily depend on adequate security policies adopted by organizations. It largely depends on the IT culture, employees’ sincerity and willingness to follow the rules, and cyber knowledge/ skills. Even if the policies and processes are in place, there can still be concerns over the relevancy of the policies as per situational demand. It also requires regular audits to assess cyber security preparedness of the organization. Any kind of vulnerability anywhere can pose the biggest threat to the digital assets of the organizations. After all, cyber crime is the greatest threat to every company in the world in the digitalization age.

Cyber Hygiene and Right Solutions

In the modern IT environment, the threat patterns have evolved a lot. In addition to malicious network traffic, threats like cloud-based identity theft, social engineering attacks, cyber espionage, unpatched security vulnerabilities, IoT-based threats and privileged access misuse tops the list of modern cyber threats.

Against this backdrop, cyber hygiene is the foremost priority of every industry today. Adoption of these solutions cannot only ensure safe day-to-day IT operations but also compliance with global regulatory standards. The solutions that top the requirements are:

Unified Identity Governance Platform – A unified identity governing engine such as Identity and Access Control Management (IDAM) solution enables IT staff to control, monitor and audit every digital identity. Centralized control mechanism helps to discover and on-board every digital identity for better management of the lifecycle of identity. Moreover, Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution, a subset of broader IDAM helps to identify security vulnerabilities in privileged access environments with advanced access control mechanisms even at a granular level.

User Behaviour Analytics (UBA)– Internal frauds, data abuse among other identity-related IT incidents happen due to the lack of end-user behaviour monitoring. For that, analyzing end-user behaviour is mandatory. Solution like UBA, with the help of its AI/ML-based algorithms, helps organizations to identify risky behaviour profiles and flag alerts beforehand. It helps organizations to take necessary steps well in advance before any probable IT catastrophe.

Endpoint Privileged Management (EPM)– Misuse of endpoints is on the rise. With a comprehensive mapping of every IT environment, EPM solution ensures a strong user validation mechanism and improves endpoint governance. Moreover, restricted elevations (just-in-time endpoint privilege) control endpoint access in every IT environment and help the organizations to mitigate risks of application abuse. 

Conclusion

Health hygiene is the best way to live a healthy life. We hardly have any choice over this. Similarly, digitalization has necessitated cyber hygiene in every layer of the enterprise IT ecosystem. A renowned American author Katherine Neville once said, “Privacy – like eating and breathing – is one of life’s basic requirements.” Today, data privacy and data security have become so important that they are being associated with the ‘basic needs’ of humans.

Cyber risk insurers inspect and analyze several parameters of the organization before issuing any policy. These are:

• If any organization lacks adequate IT security policies, then the insurer might refrain from issuing a policy to that organization
• If any organization is in non-compliance with global Information Security standards such as the EU- GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, ISO 27001, SOX, etc. then the insurer might reject the organization’s insurance coverage application
• If any modern organization with a huge number of privileged accounts in their network infrastructure, has no Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution deployed, then the organization might be deprived of any cyber insurance
• If any organization has partial deployment of any information/ IT security solution to secure its network and systems, then the insurer might deny issuing any policy
• If any organization applies for insurance during the process of migrating data to the cloud or MSP environment, then the insurer might reject the application and ask them to re-apply after the completion of data migration, because

When Cyber insurance premiums can rise manifold?

There are a good number of deciding factors that Cyber Insurance organizations look for deciding whether the insurance applicant organization is eligible for insurance coverage and the premium:

• A cyber insurance company always insists that an organization has to undergo a security vulnerability assessment test for cyber attacks. The insurer inspects the organization if it has adopted the best IT security practices by enabling robust defenses and is able to control the user activities in the modern IT ecosystem. Any kind of loophole in the security infrastructure pushes the organization towards uncertainty for insurance coverage or a higher premium. Therefore organizations should always conduct cyber vulnerability tests regularly.
• Employee education regarding every crucial security awareness, such as phishing, social engineering or malware attack should be part of an overall IT security framework. For administrative level IT threats, insurers expect that the organization should have a robust security mechanism (e.g. Privileged Access Management., PAM) in place to mitigate threats like malicious insiders’ risks, unauthorized users, compromised third-party access, password management misuse and more. Therefore for cyber hygiene, administrator-level access should be always secure, governed and controlled.
• Best security practices also include Zero Trust Privileged Access Security based. With modern-day organizations’ IT operations getting increasingly segmented and distributed, the insurers evaluate security weaknesses in the IT ecosystem and make decisions on insurance coverage. Therefore organizations should have adequate safeguards to monitor users in a distributed and segmented environment.

The Bottomline: Cyber Insurance premium is inversely proportional to an organization’s cyber hygiene. The more robust is cyber hygiene with appropriate tools especially Privileged Access Management (PAM), lower will be the cyber insurance premium.

ARCON is a leading enterprise risk control solutions provider, specializing in risk-predictive technologies. ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics enables to monitor end-user activities in real-time. ARCON | Privileged Access Management reinforces access control and mitigates data breach threats. ARCON | Secure Compliance Management is a vulnerability assessment tool.