Cloudflare says customers can quality for discounts or other added benefits from insurance providers like At-Bay, Coalition, and Cowbell Cyber for using Cloudflare to protect their websites, applications, employees, and corporate networks.

The company also built new relationships with incident response providers CrowdStrike, Mandiant, and Secureworks to refer companies under attack.

Cyber insurance surged from 26% in 2016 to 47% in 2020 following an increase in attacks, according to Cloudflare.

As a result, insurance companies have had to raise premiums to cover their costs. In the second quarter of 2021 alone, cyber insurance premiums rose by more than 25%. Now rising costs and more stringent requirements from insurers have left some businesses without options, unable to access or afford policies. As a result, a new generation of insurance startups has arisen over the past five years to rethink how cyber risk is underwritten, infusing security expertise into the insurance product.

“We’re helping protect millions of organisations every day, and cyber insurers understand the benefit that brings to keeping a company protected online,” comments Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince.

“Similar to a safe-driving discount granted through auto insurance, now companies can get discounts just for using Cloudflare to protect their organisations. By working closely with some of the most prominent cyber insurers and incident response providers we are now helping businesses to manage their risk online.”

In Q3 2021, Cloudflare automatically mitigated one of the world’s largest DDoS attacks that hit the financial services industry. Thwarting and preventing an average of 76 billion attacks per day is attractive to cyber insurers who face a rapidly growing customer base and a more complex threat landscape.

“An insurance policy is an effective tool to articulate the impact of security choices on the financial risk of a company. By offering better pricing to companies who implement stronger controls, like Cloudflare’s Comprehensive DDoS Protection, we help customers understand how best to reduce risk,” says At-Bay co-founder and CEO Rotem Iram.

“Incentivising our customers to adopt innovative security solutions like Cloudflare, combined with At-Bay’s free active risk monitoring, has helped reduce ransomware in At-Bay’s portfolio 7x below the market average,” Iram says.

“It’s incredible what Cloudflare has done to create a safer Internet. When Cloudflare’s technology is paired with insurance, we are able to protect businesses in an entirely new way,” explains Coalition co-founder and CEO Joshua Motta.

“Collaborating with cybersecurity companies like Cloudflare will definitely enable a more data-driven underwriting approach that the industry needs,” says Corvus Insurance head of strategic partnerships Nate Walsh.

“Through partners like Cloudflare, we want to encourage these businesses to adopt the best security standards and proactively address vulnerabilities, so they can benefit from savings on their cyber insurance policy premiums,” comments Cowbell Cyber CEO and founder Jack Kudale.

“Our partnership with Cloudflare provides companies the ability to take action rapidly and contain exposure at the time of an attack, enabling them to get back on their feet and return to business as usual as quickly as possible,” says CrowdStrike Services senior vice president Thomas Etheridge.

“Together, Mandiant and Cloudflare are enabling our mutual customers to mitigate the risk breaches pose to their business operations,” comments Mandiant executive vice president and chief technology officer Marshall Heilman.

“Secureworks’ proactive incident response and adversarial testing expertise combined with Cloudflare’s intelligent global platform enables our mutual customers to better mitigate the threats of sophisticated cyberattacks,” concludes Strategic Alliances vice president Chris Bell. “This partnership is a much needed approach to addressing advanced cyber threats with speed and automation.”