Leader: Insurers must account for disaster recovery

When we buy home contents insurance, we are asked a series of very specific questions relating to the doors, locks, roof, walls and windows that protect our home. We are asked about access to the property, whether we have a burglar alarm, whether we are members of a neighbourhood watch scheme, when the house was built and almost every other detail up to and including whether we like to sleep with a light on.

With car insurance the list of questions is similarly complex and yet these two liabilities rarely stretch to potential losses of more than around £10,000 to £20,000 (with apologies to any fine-art collectors and Bentley owners among our readership).

Yet when it comes to insuring businesses with multimillion-pound liabilities there are some glaring questions which are apparently going unasked, such as where and how companies back up their data. And given we are now in an information-based society where companies are often worth little more than the sum of their intellectual property and mission critical data, this seems a shocking oversight.

Nobody wants to think their business may one day be at the epicentre of a major incident but in this day and age they should be able to demonstrate that they are aware companies must plan for all such scenarios.

A company which shows little regard for its data and fails to back it up with one eye on a worst-case scenario may well be treated in the same way by their insurer as a neighbour who backs up all its data offsite in a secure datacentre far enough removed from its core operations to protect against both sites being rocked by everything from severe weather, to power cuts and even terrorist attacks.

Nobody wants to think their business may one day be at the epicentre of a major incident but in this day and age they should be able to demonstrate that they are aware companies must plan for all such scenarios.

Of course with incidents such as terrorist attacks or natural disasters our first natural reaction is 'where is everybody, where are our colleagues?' but that doesn't mean it's not a cold hard fact of business that somebody must also ask 'where is our data?' - and somebody must be able to answer that question.

"It's backed up on some tapes which were left on top of the server they'd just backed up" is not the answer anybody wants to hear.

Though at the moment it seems insurers aren't particularly fussed either way.