How Cyber Insurance in India is Shaping Up?
India is now a soft target for hackers, with over 50,000 cyber attacks happening every year. Foreseeing this, the cyber insurance market in the country is at a nascent stage, corporate are unaware of the benefits of its coverage, the products, and the exclusions. Despite the increase in cyber insurance, the hackers are still ahead of the organizations that adopt various cyber security techniques such as AI, ML, cloud security, data management, and others to prevent fraud and data theft.
Cyber Insurance is a risk management and mitigation strategy that has a corollary benefit of improving the adoption of preventive measures. It was introduced to cover the fees, expenses, and legal costs associated with cyber breaches that happen after an organization has been hacked.
Globally, cyber insurance is expected to grow at a CAGR of 27 percent from 2017 to 2024. According to the studies, India is the 2nd most-affected country due to targeted attacks and it is estimated that the average cost for a data breach in India has gone up to INR 11.9 crores, with an increase of 7.9 percent from 2017 with an average cost per record being INR 4,552. Most of the MNCs and large corporations spend high on cyber security products and solutions as a means to safeguard businesses, accepting the fact that complete security cannot be achieved as attacks keep evolving day by day.
Rising digitalization of businesses due to adoption of Cloud, Mobile, Social Media and IoT, thus expanding the threat surface, the current evolving threat landscape, the recent ransomware/malware, increasing awareness on cybersecurity, apprehensions around implication of GDPR and India’s Personal Data Protection Bill are some of the driving factors for cyber insurance.
However, cyber insurance providers are planning well ahead for the next strategic steps following government/regulatory bodies/associations, tech firms, brokers, insured/buyers, carriers and more. Also, cyber insurance must follow a pre-buying requisites such as engage with a third party (broker/tech provider) to analyze, upgrade, identify the right set of carriers, and get better deals on premium, before going for the buy its recommended to create a ‘cyber-insurance cross-functional committee’ that has representation from Insurance Purchase Group, Offices of CFO, CEO, CIO/CISO, CRO and CMO for better decision making.
