How MFA, EDR, and XDR can reduce the cost of Cybersecurity insurance!

SCWorld.com reported that “Almost all businesses need cybersecurity insurance to manage their digital risk, but not all realize that there are ways to reduce their insurance premiums by implementing certain protections.” The March 26, 2025 article entitled “How two organizations beat the cyber insurance maze” (https://tinyurl.com/mu2wec54) included these comments:

…most cybersecurity insurance carriers prefer that their customers implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) on user accounts. Some even require their clients to put MFA on privileged or administrative accounts to qualify for coverage.

A robust vulnerability-management program, accompanied by timely software patching, is another protection that insurance carriers like to see. Other protections favored by insurance companies include endpoint detection and response (EDR) or extended detection and response (XDR), automated platforms that detect and automatically respond to suspicious activity.

They're also keen on incident-response plans that lay out how a company's security team handles specific kinds of attacks, ideally accompanied by training exercises that run through attack scenarios.

Deploying such measures often requires enlarging the cybersecurity budget, but that increase can be offset by the potential savings that come with discounted insurance premiums. Alternately, some organizations might use that windfall to raise their coverage limits.

That's especially important because cybersecurity insurance carriers have been hiking their rates, lowering their coverage limits and adding to their protection requirements as ransomware payments and recovery costs skyrocket.

Good news!