Cloudflare collaborates with leading cyber insurers to help businesses reduce their cyber risk

Cloudflare announced it is partnering with leading cyber insurance companies to help businesses manage their risks online.

Eligible Cloudflare customers can qualify for discounts or other added benefits from insurance providers like At-Bay, Coalition, and Cowbell Cyber for using Cloudflare to protect any of their websites, applications, employees, and corporate networks. Cloudflare also announced new relationships with prominent incident response providers CrowdStrike, Mandiant, and Secureworks, enabling them to rapidly refer companies under attack.

As cyberattacks increase in volume and severity, the number of businesses selecting cyber insurance has surged from 26% in 2016 to 47% in 2020. As a result, some insurance companies have had to raise premiums to cover their costs. In the second quarter of 2021 alone, cyber insurance premiums rose by more than 25%.

Now rising costs and more stringent requirements from insurers have left some businesses without options, unable to access or afford policies. As a result, a new generation of insurance startups has arisen over the past five years to rethink how cyber risk is underwritten, infusing security expertise into the insurance product.

“We’re helping protect millions of organizations every day, and cyber insurers understand the benefit that brings to keeping a company protected online,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “Similar to a safe-driving discount granted through auto insurance, now companies can get discounts just for using Cloudflare to protect their organizations. By working closely with some of the most prominent cyber insurers and incident response providers we are now helping businesses to comprehensively manage their risk online.”

In Q3 2021, Cloudflare automatically mitigated one of the world’s largest DDoS attacks that hit a customer in the financial services industry. The ability to thwart and prevent an average of 76 billion attacks per day is attractive to cyber insurers who are faced with covering a rapidly growing customer base and a more complex threat landscape.

“An insurance policy is an effective tool to articulate the impact of security choices on the financial risk of a company. By offering better pricing to companies who implement stronger controls, like Cloudflare’s Comprehensive DDoS Protection, we help customers understand how best to reduce risk,” said Rotem Iram, co-founder and CEO of At-Bay. “Incentivizing our customers to adopt innovative security solutions like Cloudflare, combined with At-Bay’s free active risk monitoring, has helped reduce ransomware in At-Bay’s portfolio 7x below the market average.”

“It’s incredible what Cloudflare has done to create a safer Internet. When Cloudflare’s technology is paired with insurance, we are able to protect businesses in an entirely new way,” said Joshua Motta, Co-founder & CEO, Coalition. “We are excited to offer Cloudflare customers enhanced cyber insurance coverage alongside Coalition’s active security monitoring platform to help businesses build true cyber resilience with an always-on insurance policy.”

“We are excited to work with Cloudflare to address our customers’ cybersecurity needs and help reduce their cyber risk. Collaborating with cybersecurity companies like Cloudflare will definitely enable a more data-driven underwriting approach that the industry needs,” said Nate Walsh, Head of Strategic Partnerships at Corvus Insurance.

“The complexity and frequency of cyberattacks continue to rise, and small and medium enterprises are increasingly becoming the center of these attacks. Through partners like Cloudflare, we want to encourage these businesses to adopt the best security standards and proactively address vulnerabilities, so they can benefit from savings on their cyber insurance policy premiums,” said Jack Kudale, Founder and CEO, Cowbell Cyber.

When a business is under attack every minute is important. Incident response companies work hard to get a network back online or restore traffic to a website after an attack. To make that process easier and faster, Cloudflare is partnering with CrowdStrike, Mandiant, and Secureworks to enable rapid referral of organizations under attack.

“The speed in which a company is able to identify, investigate and remediate a threat heavily determines how it will fare in the end,” said Thomas Etheridge, senior vice president of CrowdStrike Services. “Our partnership with Cloudflare provides companies the ability to take action rapidly and contain exposure at the time of an attack, enabling them to get back on their feet and return to business as usual as quickly as possible.”

“As cyber threats continue to rapidly evolve, the need for organizations to put response plans in place increases. Together, Mandiant and Cloudflare are enabling our mutual customers to mitigate the risk breaches pose to their business operations. We hope to see more of these much-needed technology collaborations that help organizations address the growing threat of ransomware and DDoS attacks in a timely manner,” said Marshall Heilman, EVP & Chief Technology Officer, Mandiant.

“Secureworks’ proactive incident response and adversarial testing expertise combined with Cloudflare’s intelligent global platform enables our mutual customers to better mitigate the threats of sophisticated cyberattacks,” said Chris Bell, Vice President, Strategic Alliances, Secureworks. “This partnership is a much needed approach to addressing advanced cyber threats with speed and automation.”