These days, data is a business-critical asset. Unfortunately, that makes it a key target for today’s cybercriminals, with cyber attacks often aimed at encrypting, exfiltrating or manipulating data to maximize business disruption. In response, most cyber insurance policies offer the term ‘data recovery’ as a means of safeguarding businesses. But what if data isn’t recoverable?
To close this protection gap, CFC cyber policies provide data recreation; a single word that makes a world of difference, promising to help recreate any data deemed unrecoverable. In looking for the right cyber insurance policy, it’s vital to take note of these small yet significant word changes, as they can be the difference in ensuring businesses have the protection they need.
What is data recreation?
To keep data protected, it’s important to regularly take backups of your network and store those backups securely. Then, if your systems are targeted in a cyber attack, and data is no longer accessible, a cyber insurance policy that offers data recovery will help restore systems and data using these stored backups. This can be extremely useful and help reduce the need to negotiate with hackers or pay a ransom. But recovering data isn’t always possible. You may have not have been backing up correctly or backing up at all. Even if you have been backing up, you might find that your data is damaged or incomplete when trying to restore from it. Cybercriminals know the value of data, and it’s not uncommon for them to locate backups, manipulate the datasets or delete them permanently. Considering the value of data in today’s business world, losing this asset can have disastrous consequences for any business, and hackers know it.
CFC works with the policyholder to recreate that data from scratch, covering all the costs.
Data recreation works differently. In a cyber incident that results in data backups being unavailable or data is deemed unrecoverable, CFC works with the policyholder to recreate that data from scratch. This can include covering the costs of involving external industry specialists to re-build datasets and applications back to their pre-incident state, or as close as physically possible.
Business benefits: Full protection for a vital business asset
Data recreation is invaluable peace of mind. Losing sensitive data or any data pivotal to day-to-day operations can be extremely disruptive and the costs of recreation can be significant. But, the right cyber insurance policy can cover the associated costs, providing the support required to get the business back up and running.
Data recreation in action
An engineering firm fell victim to the infamous WannaCry ransomware, which encrypted all of the data files on the firm’s server as well as data they had backed up on a local hard drive. This included technical drawings, prints and complex design specifications for various projects and bids from over the years. Luckily they’d been backing up their data to a cloud server, or so they thought. After attempting to backup data from the cloud, the firm discovered these backups had been failing for years, making every project and proposal from the last few years unrecoverable. Fortunately, the firm had a CFC cyber insurance policy in place.
The total cost of re-creation came to $270,000—a significant increase from the initial cost of managing the incident, but all was covered by the firm’s CFC cyber policy.
Working with the firm, we determined a method for costing the task of recreation. The task itself involved external engineers being brought in to assist the senior management team to recreate all that was lost. The total cost of re-creation came to $270,000—a significant increase from the initial cost of managing the incident, but all covered by the firm’s policy with CFC.
Finding the right cyber insurance policy
When choosing a cyber provider, it’s vital to check for nuanced wording such as data recreation, not just recovery, to ensure your clients are getting comprehensive cover. To make things plain and simple, CFC avoid complex legal language and write our policies in a way you can understand..
To see data recreation in action, check out this full case study. As always, our team is on-hand to answer any questions. Get in touch here.
