More than six months into 2021 and we have already experienced an increase in cyberattacks by 29%. This year, many big enterprises, like CNA Financial, Microsoft Exchange, Acer, and Accellion, recovered from major cyberattacks and data thefts.
Cyberthreats are everywhere, and every business, whether big or small, is prone to these risks. With an increasing number of security attacks, premiums for cyber liability insurance are also skyrocketing. As a result, the cost of IT expenditure is impacting budgets even before an attack happens.
This post will discuss how Desktop as a Service (DaaS) hosting can help reduce the cybersecurity insurance premiums.
Why Is Cybersecurity Challenging But Essential?
In the cybersecurity landscape, we can never assess and judge every security risk. It is a dynamic environment that keeps changing and evolving. Hence, there’s no way we can start defending our businesses entirely overnight. It’s a constant struggle, which we can mitigate using DaaS.
Desktop as a Service is a technology deploying your desktop environments to the cloud and using it remotely via an internet connection. DaaS services help us keep updating, maintaining, encrypting, and patching security loopholes. Since it is a managed service, your business doesn’t need to worry about security processes.
It is necessary to understand that we can’t rely on Windows Defender to keep saving us from cyber issues. These attacks are evolving, and we need a security framework to secure personally identifiable information (PII) and sensitive business data.
However, the problem is businesses are now operating digitally. From financial transactions to sensitive data sharing, online business-critical operations create a major bottleneck in the security structure. Maintaining high-level security through Desktop as a Service is a key to reducing cyber insurance premiums.
It Can Happen To You As Well!
Many businesses don’t understand the complexity of cyberspace until they experience a threat. Every digitally operating company is exposed to cyberattacks. Whether you are allowing BYOD policy, working from home, or using smartphones to communicate data, you risk data theft.
According to this government cyber threat report, 56% of cyberattacks happen because of poor or compromised system architecture. There is a significant reason your business is at risk of cyberattacks—human error. The most significant error of all is human mistakes leading a hacker into your business environment and revealing data.
What Happens After A Cyberattack?
Once an organization suffers a cyberattack, they experience the following one by one which raise critical questions:
- Financial losses. How will you recover from the data theft?
- Reputational damage. How will your customers rely on you again?
- Productivity loss. How will your workforce recover from disruptions?
Why Are Cyber Insurance Costs Rising?
From the above discussion, it is obvious why cyber insurance premium is increasing. Here’s a glimpse of all these reasons:
- Ransomware attacks, including the ransom, are very costly. Therefore, your premium is also expensive.
- After the pandemic especially, cyberattacks have increased, and so has the liability.
- There’s an increase in regulations due to increasing cyber issues. For example, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) applies to any company doing business in or with the EU. These stringent guidelines also increase the risk of non-compliance.
- In all, because of all these factors, we observe an increase in cyber insurance premiums.
How To Reduce Cybersecurity Premiums
Every insurance organization checks your security architecture before deciding the premium. If you have a strong structure that decreases the chances of security attacks, you would be able to decrease your premium.
It is interesting to note that every feature that we are discussing is offered by DaaS services (as a managed solution). Let’s see how it works:
Disaster Recovery
When your computer systems fail, or you suffer an attack, how do you recover?
This contingency plan is a disaster recovery solution. DaaS services include disaster recovery because the provider backs up your data regularly to different isolated servers. Even in case of a ransomware attack, you can recover quickly. Wipe that computer clean and start accessing your cloud desktop.
Incident Response
More than the ‘how’ of suffering a breach, it is about the timing. We need to quickly find the breach, contain it, and prevent significant damage. Desktop as a service enables continuous monitoring via an Intrusion Detection and Prevention system. It consistently monitors your systems and catches an incident early enough to contain it. IDS/IPS will often automatically prevent incidents, and when it can’t, security professionals of the cloud provider would be informed to take immediate action.
Two-Factor Authentication
Desktop as a Service hosting provider users with multi-factor authentication via firewalls to prevent unauthorized access. No unknown person should get a backdoor to your data or break into your system. Hence, authorizing the person multiple times is the key to preventing unauthorized access to your cloud desktops. It also reduces your premium because the chances of sensitive data theft reduce
Data Encryption
When you are hosting your business data, you are responsible for managing and securing this data. This includes data transmission or accessing it from an application.
DaaS services secure your resting as well as transmitting data via TLS 1.3 and 256-bit encryption. Securing data in transit safeguards your applications to some extent, which contributes to a lower premium.
Software Patching
Your business needs to patch software consistently. It is not a one-time activity; it is continuous and should be achieved regularly to eliminate the risk of cyberattacks. DaaS pricing includes patching and maintenance of your desktops. They monitor, evaluate, and patch your software regularly to eliminate threats.
Employee Training
Lastly, an essential part of IT security is training employees. You need to educate your employees to avoid opening suspicious emails, not share passwords and avoid leaving the cloud desktop open on a system.
Conclusion
We can’t control the external factors increasing the cybersecurity premiums. However, by using the above tips, we can improve the organization’s cybersecurity and move towards reducing premium costs. With a better cybersecurity structure, you get a lower cyber insurance premium. In addition, your organization can reduce the likelihood of going through a cyberattack.
Find the right Desktop as a Service hosting provider, discuss the above implementations, and deploy DaaS for lower cybersecurity premiums.
Author’s Bio: Bhavleen Kaur is a content writer at Ace Cloud Hosting- a leading DaaS Provider. She specializes in writing about VDI, DaaS, cloud technology, and cloud-based desktops & likes to know about upcoming technology and trends. In her free time, you can find her reading novels or watching movies.
Images credit by Pro Elements Envato
