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What Cyber Insurers Really Want (and What You Need to Show Them)

By Ntirety | May 09, 2025

Not long ago, getting cyber insurance was simple: answer a few questions, sign the paperwork, and you were covered.

That’s no longer the case.

As ransomware attacks surge and claims skyrocket, insurers have raised the bar. Today, they’re looking for evidence that your business can prevent, contain, and recover from cyber threats. That means demonstrating clear proof of security controls, compliance practices, and operational resilience.

The shift is more than procedural—it’s strategic. Cyber insurance has become a business necessity, and meeting evolving standards is now essential to securing coverage and minimizing risk.

Even as cyber insurance premiums declined globally by seven percent in Q4 2024,¹ underwriting expectations continue to climb. Rates are projected to rise as much as 20 percent annually through 2026 for organizations that fail to meet insurer benchmarks.² Cyber policies now act as both carrot and stick, rewarding maturity and penalizing its absence.³

For organizations navigating renewals or applying for coverage, the message is clear: cyber resilience is no longer optional. To qualify for better coverage and avoid exclusions, you need a clear, defensible posture. Here’s how to get there.

Insured to Assured: The New Compliance Mandate

As the insurance industry matures, carriers are becoming more selective. To reduce risk and protect their bottom line, they’re demanding greater transparency and tougher security guarantees from policyholders. That means showing, not just saying, that your organization is equipped to:

Prevent and contain threats

Minimize damage and data loss

Restore operations quickly

It’s no longer enough to have antivirus software and a firewall. Insurers now expect a complete security and compliance stack, backed by documentation, testing, and reporting. Your ability to demonstrate operational maturity, from policy enforcement to recovery readiness, is becoming the foundation of insurability. That means proving preventative measures, showing governance and awareness, and validating recoverability. These expectations have become the baseline for securing or renewing coverage.

What Cyber Insurers Are Looking For

Cyber insurers are no longer just checking boxes; they’re evaluating how well your organization can secure, detect, and recover from fast-evolving threats. Based on guidance from industry bodies like the NAIC and GAO, insurers commonly assess cyber maturity across six key domains. These categories align closely with the biggest risks driving claims today.4

Visibility

Ransomware, business email compromise (BEC), and data breaches often exploit blind spots—whether it’s unknown assets, user behaviors, or unmonitored endpoints. Insurers want to know: Can you see what’s happening across your environment in real time? Centralized logging, asset inventories, and continuous monitoring are now foundational.

Risk Management

With bad actors causing major disruption, underwriters are looking for clear governance. Who owns cyber risk? Are policies enforced and regularly tested? Risk management isn’t just a checkbox—it’s evidence of operational maturity.

Prevention

Sophisticated attacks often succeed when basic controls are missing. Multi-factor authentication (MFA), regular patching, and secure configurations aren’t “nice to have.” They’re the minimum standard to access coverage or keep premiums in check.

Detection and Response

Malware and phishing move fast. If you can’t detect a breach and contain it quickly, you’ll face longer downtime, greater losses, and tougher questions from insurers. That’s why providers expect threat monitoring, endpoint detection and response (EDR), and automated containment.

Resilience

Insurers are prioritizing resilience: your ability to keep operations running during an incident. The cost of a ransomware attack isn’t just the payout. It’s in stalled business, delayed services, and eroded trust. Segmentation, redundancy, and continuity planning matter more than ever.

Recoverability

Fast recovery is the difference between business interruption and business survival. From tested disaster recovery (DR) plans to verified backups and recovery time objectives (RTOs), insurers want proof that your organization can bounce back, and not just on paper.

Meeting expectations like these doesn’t just help you get insured. It improves your overall position. Organizations that invest in strong security controls not only reduce risk—they gain leverage.

Stronger security pays off: 99.6 percent of organizations that made improvements reported better insurance results, from lower premiums to more comprehensive coverage.5 That means better terms, broader coverage, and more favorable pricing. Just as importantly, those same investments help meet data privacy regulations, making compliance and insurability two sides of the same strategic coin.

Strengthen Your Posture. Secure Your Policy.

It’s no longer enough to say you’re secure. You have to prove it. As insurers raise the bar, organizations need more than security tools or point-in-time fixes. They need a partner who can help them build a defensible, audit-ready, and future-proof compliance posture.

Ntirety Compliance Lifecycle Services are purpose-built to help.

Built to operationalize compliance—not just check boxes—our end-to-end offering delivers the structure, expertise, and momentum to meet insurer expectations and sustain readiness. From risk identification to audit support, Ntirety helps you close gaps, strengthen recoverability, and show the maturity insurers are looking for.

Whether you’re applying for cyber insurance for the first time or trying to improve coverage at renewal, Ntirety helps you move from uncertainty to clarity, backed by a lifecycle-based approach designed for long-term success.

Because the real value isn’t just getting covered. It’s building the kind of resilience, trust, and operational maturity that earns better terms, broader coverage, and greater business confidence.