Cyber cover is the short name a broker will use, and for a business meeting it for the first time the useful question is not what it is called but what actually happens if you claim. The answer is fairly consistent across the UK market: you ring a number, somebody who has handled this before takes over the response, and the policy pays the bills that follow within the limits on your schedule. Everything else is detail about which bills.
What happens on the day you claim
You call the incident line, usually before you call anybody else. A response manager takes the details and decides what is needed: forensic investigators to find out what happened, a specialist to restore systems, a lawyer to advise on reporting duties, and sometimes a communications firm. The policy pays them directly in most cases rather than reimbursing you afterwards, which matters to a business that could not fund the response out of its own account.
The bills the policy is designed to meet
Investigation and recovery of your systems and data. Income lost while you could not trade, after a waiting period. Telling the people whose data was exposed and dealing with their questions. Legal costs of the regulatory process and of any claim brought against you. A ransom, where the wording includes it and the conditions are met. Money taken by deception, where a crime section was bought.
What it will not do
It will not restore the business to a better state than it was in, pay for security improvements you had been postponing, or answer for a loss you already knew about when you bought it. It will not make a contractual penalty disappear if that penalty is not a legal liability. It will not cover a deliberate act by the insured. And it will not replace backups, because several wordings make maintaining them a condition.
What to have ready before you ask for a quote
Turnover, the kind of personal data you hold and roughly how many records, whether you take payments and how, whether remote access and email use multi factor authentication, how backups are held and when they were last tested, and whether anything has happened before. That is most of a proposal form, and having it written down turns a week of email into a single conversation.
Questions people ask about cyber cover
How much does cyber cover cost?
It scales with turnover, the data held and the limit bought, and the controls in place move it materially. The only honest figure is a quote, and the fastest way to lower it is to fix multi factor authentication and backups first.
Is cyber cover included in my business insurance?
Sometimes as a small section with a modest limit. Look on the schedule for a stated cyber limit. An included section is a starting point rather than a substitute for a standalone policy if the exposure is real.
What limit should I buy?
Start from the worst realistic incident rather than a round number: the days you could not trade, the number of people you would have to notify, and the largest payment that could be diverted. Then check the sub limits, because the aggregate is not what most claims run against.
Do I need it if everything is in the cloud?
Yes. Using a cloud provider moves where the systems live, not who is responsible for the data or who loses income when access stops. Several wordings specifically address outages at an outsourced provider, and that clause is worth reading.