In a world of rampant cybersecurity threats and a rising tide of ransomware attacks , how are insurers keeping this data private – and what more can be done ?

“ Insurance is a data-hungry business ,” explains Rory Yates , SVP of Global Strategy for EIS . “ Insurers take a lot of our data , and other related data , to calculate how in a pooled and capital-invested model they can reduce the financial burden of risk . It ’ s a massive data exchange based on trust and financial leverage .

“ I once worked with a market-leading UK insurer who had calculated they had more unstructured data than Facebook – something they were proud of until my team pointed out that this was expensive , largely without an ROI , planet-destructive , and‌potentially dangerous .”

Data governance ‘ a critical aspect ’ for today ’ s insurers Indeed , data is more abundant now than it has been in a long time ; there has been an explosion of data available to insurers over the past decade , not least because of a growing number of Internet of Things IoT devices , smart sensors and parametrics equipment .

“ How insurance organisations handle that avalanche of information is critical to success ,” Yates says . “ Data in the core technology and operational context is often one aspect of the data environment , where now we see third parties , BI and BI redundancy and back-up all acting as huge stores of the same data . It ’ ll require other aspects of data security to be considered , and will continue to be an area of focus for insurers .” insurtechdigital . com 103