By Rob Wong, CEO, Atomic Technology Solutions Published July 2026 · 8 min read
If you have renewed a cyber insurance policy in the last two years, you already know the process has changed. The questionnaire is longer. The underwriters are asking more specific questions about your security controls. And if you cannot answer those questions with confidence, you are either paying significantly more for coverage or being declined altogether.
This is not a temporary trend. It is a structural shift in how the insurance industry thinks about cyber risk — and it has real consequences for businesses that have not kept their security posture current.
What Changed, and Why
For most of the 2010s, cyber insurance was relatively easy to obtain. Underwriters were still building their actuarial models, premiums were low, and the application process was largely a formality. Then came a wave of high-profile ransomware attacks — Colonial Pipeline, JBS Foods, Kaseya — that resulted in massive payouts and forced insurers to take a hard look at what they were actually covering.
The result was a rapid tightening of underwriting standards. Insurers began requiring documented evidence of specific controls rather than simply taking applicants at their word. Multi-factor authentication, endpoint detection and response, privileged access management, and tested backup and recovery procedures went from “nice to have” to table stakes for coverage. In many cases, businesses that had held policies for years found themselves facing non-renewal because they could not demonstrate these controls were actually in place and functioning.
The businesses most caught off guard were small and mid-sized organizations — exactly the ones that had assumed cyber insurance was a problem for larger companies to worry about.
What Insurers Are Actually Looking For
The specific requirements vary by carrier and policy tier, but there are a handful of controls that have become nearly universal in modern cyber insurance underwriting.
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is the most commonly required control, and it needs to be applied broadly — not just to email, but to remote access, cloud applications, and administrative accounts. Insurers have learned that a significant percentage of successful attacks begin with compromised credentials, and MFA is the single most effective control against that attack vector.
Endpoint detection and response (EDR) has largely replaced traditional antivirus as the baseline expectation. Where antivirus looks for known malware signatures, EDR monitors behavior across endpoints in real time and can detect and contain threats that have never been seen before. If your organization is still running legacy antivirus as its primary endpoint protection, that will show up on an underwriting review.
Privileged access management — controlling and auditing who has administrative access to your systems — is increasingly required, particularly for organizations in healthcare, finance, and legal. The reasoning is straightforward: attackers who gain access to an administrative account can do far more damage than those working with standard user credentials.
Tested backup and recovery is perhaps the most important and most overlooked requirement. Insurers are not just asking whether you have backups — they are asking whether you have tested them, how frequently, and how long recovery would actually take. An untested backup is not a backup; it is a hope.
Security awareness training for employees is now a standard requirement, with many carriers asking for evidence of regular training and simulated phishing exercises. Human error remains the leading cause of successful attacks, and insurers want to see that organizations are actively working to reduce that exposure.
The Compliance Gap Most Businesses Don’t Know They Have
Here is where many organizations run into trouble: they believe they have these controls in place, but they have never formally assessed whether those controls are configured correctly, consistently applied, and actually functioning as intended.
A firewall that was installed three years ago and never reviewed is not the same as a current, properly configured firewall. MFA that was enabled for email but not for the VPN leaves a significant gap. Backups that run nightly but have never been restored to verify integrity are not reliable evidence of recovery capability.
This gap between “we have it” and “we can demonstrate it works” is exactly what cyber insurance underwriters are probing for — and it is also exactly what attackers look for. The two problems are not separate. Closing the compliance gap and reducing your actual risk are the same work.
What a Compliance Readiness Assessment Actually Involves
A compliance readiness assessment is not an audit in the punitive sense. It is a structured review of your current security controls against the specific requirements of your cyber insurance policy and any applicable regulatory frameworks — HIPAA, CMMC, state-level privacy laws — that apply to your organization.
The output is a clear picture of where you stand, what gaps exist, and what needs to be addressed before your next renewal. For most businesses, this involves reviewing documentation of existing controls, testing backup and recovery procedures, validating that MFA is applied consistently across all required systems, and assessing whether security awareness training is current and effective.
The goal is not to generate a report that sits in a drawer. It is to give your leadership team the information they need to make decisions — about what to fix, in what order, and what the cost of inaction looks like compared to the cost of remediation.
A Practical Starting Point
If you are not sure where your organization stands, the most useful first step is a direct review of your current cyber insurance application or renewal questionnaire. Read through every question and ask yourself honestly: can we document this? Do we have evidence that this control is in place and functioning?
The questions you cannot answer confidently are your priority list.
If your renewal is coming up in the next six to twelve months, now is the right time to address those gaps — not the week before the application is due. Underwriters are not looking for perfection. They are looking for organizations that take security seriously, have documented their controls, and can demonstrate that they have addressed known vulnerabilities.
At Atomic, we work with organizations across healthcare, legal, manufacturing, and professional services to assess their current security posture, identify the gaps that matter most for their specific insurance and compliance requirements, and build a practical remediation plan. The goal is not to check boxes — it is to make sure your technology is actually protecting your business, and that you can demonstrate that to the people who are being asked to insure it.
The Bottom Line
Cyber insurance is not going away, and the requirements are not getting easier. The organizations that navigate this well are the ones that treat compliance readiness as an ongoing operational discipline rather than an annual scramble before renewal. The good news is that the controls insurers require are also the controls that meaningfully reduce your risk — so the investment pays off in more ways than one.
If you would like to talk through where your organization stands, we are happy to start with a straightforward conversation. No questionnaire required.
Rob Wong is the CEO of Atomic Technology Solutions, a managed IT and cybersecurity firm serving organizations across Southern California, Nevada, and nationwide. He has spent over 25 years helping businesses build technology environments that are secure, reliable, and aligned with their operational goals.
Atomic Technology Solutions · Irvine, CA · Las Vegas, NV · atomicts.com/
Frequently Asked Questions
What controls do cyber insurers most commonly require? The most universally required controls are multi-factor authentication across all remote access and administrative accounts, endpoint detection and response (EDR), tested and documented backup and recovery procedures, privileged access management, and regular employee security awareness training. Requirements vary by carrier and coverage tier, but these five appear consistently across most modern cyber insurance applications.
What is a compliance readiness assessment? A compliance readiness assessment is a structured review of your current security controls against the specific requirements of your cyber insurance policy and any applicable regulatory frameworks. It identifies gaps between what you have in place and what you can document and demonstrate — and produces a prioritized remediation plan to close those gaps before your next renewal.
How far in advance should we prepare for a cyber insurance renewal? Ideally, six to twelve months before renewal. Many of the controls underwriters require — particularly tested backup and recovery procedures and consistent MFA deployment — take time to implement and document properly. Starting the week before your application is due does not leave enough time to address meaningful gaps.
Does having cyber insurance mean our business is protected from a cyberattack? No. Cyber insurance covers financial losses after an incident — it does not prevent attacks from occurring. The controls that insurers require are the same controls that reduce the likelihood and impact of an attack. The insurance and the security work reinforce each other, but they are not substitutes for one another.
What happens if we cannot meet the insurer’s requirements? Depending on the carrier and the specific gaps, you may face higher premiums, reduced coverage limits, exclusions for certain types of incidents, or non-renewal. In some cases, organizations are declined entirely. The earlier you identify and address gaps, the more options you have.
Rob Wong LinkedIn URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/atomicrob/
