A Marsh study showed that the demand for this protection increased considerably in 2012.
According to a report issued by Marsh Inc., the broker and risk adviser, the demand for coverage with cyber liability insurance increased as a growing number of businesses purchased the protection.
The average policy limits that were taken out also increased during last year, said the report.
The number of clients of FINPRO at Marsh that took out cyber insurance last year increased by 33.3 percent over the number from the year before. This, according to the report that the company issued, called “Benchmarking Trends: More Companies Purchasing Cyber Insurance.”
Among all of the industries purchasing cyber insurance, it was the services sector that saw the most growth.
The service sector that was purchasing cyber insurance included business, professional, accounting, legal, and personal services. The increase that was seen in the service sector was 75.5 percent. The education sector came in second, with an increase of 72.2 percent.
Among the reasons that companies are purchasing cyber insurance at a much greater rate has to do with some of the number of highly visible and publicized data breaches that have occurred among very large organizations. The importance of this coverage has risen from being a discretionary policy to one that is considered to be essential. This is especially true among smaller to mid-sized organizations, said the Marsh report.
Robert Parisi, the Marsh Network Security and Privacy Practice Leader in New York, said that organizations “are now looking to manage their day-to-day cyber risks in the same way they do more traditional risks — through the purchase of insurance,” in a statement that he made for the report.
At the same time, the average limits of cyber insurance that were purchased in 2012 increased by nearly 20 percent. All of the industries were lead by communications, media and technology, both in the area of the average limits that were purchased (which was $33.4 million) and in the rate of increase over the limits that they had purchased the year before (which was almost 36 percent), according to the Marsh report.
