Who Comes After The Spiderman Takes Off?

Cyber insurance is no more a footnote in the backyard of any enterprise's IT strategy. It is the turnstile now. But is it helping enough to let the right future arrive in time?

- Pratima H

Insuring an ice-cream taster, a wine connoisseur, a food critic, a footballer's leg, a guitarist's hands, a beautiful smile! That could have sounded outrageous some years back. But John Harrison, Angela Mount, Egon Ronay, David Beckham, Keith Richards and Julia Roberts, indeed, turned out names to be said in the same breath as the word 'insurance'.

Some years back all this would have been implausible. But people and companies, paranoid hearts and cautious minds, do prepare for all kinds of contingencies. That's why we have heard of a Derbyshire Whiskers Club which insured their beards against fire and theft. That's why, apparently, there are policies taken to be well-equipped for all shades of disaster-days- from kidnapping, alien abduction, a no-girlfriend Valentine day, a cancelled wedding and even the possibility of turning into a vampire or werewolf!

It may sound funny but definitely not in the insurer's mind. So if cyber-insurance still sounded funny and unnecessary to an enterprise, all that anyone needed was a blow after-blow knock-out of the last two years. From supply-chain attacks like Solar winds to out-of-the-blue cloud outages, to sudden but-merciless ransomware attacks, to open software cracks and zero-day wounds like Proxy Logon and like Log4j, to data dents at major tech giants, oil pipelines, automotive majors - the average CIO, CXO and CISO had many a sleepless nights in the last few months.