ACE European Group (ACE) has joined forces with information security specialist QCC to offer crisis management consultancy as part of its IT network risk solution – ACE Dataguard. The enhanced cover provides greater support for business in managing reputational issues in the event of an incident which puts their corporate information and networked assets at risk.
ACE is responding to a survey of senior European risk managers in which 90% cited protecting the corporate reputation of their business as their key priority. Survey respondents identified security breaches, including sensitive data leaks and hacking of customer data as one of the major threats to corporate reputation. The research conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and sponsored by ACE, also found that 84% of those questioned felt that threats to their corporate reputation had increased over the last five years. As many as 50% of those surveyed reported that their organisation had already suffered financial losses as a result of damage to their corporate reputation.
Shaun Cooper, ACE’s senior network risk underwriter, said: ‘Reputational risk is the single biggest challenge facing businesses today and network risk is a key threat to corporate reputation. ACE’s network risk Dataguard product helps clients mitigate risk in this area. However, through our new partnership with QCC, we can also provide clients with a holistic solution to protecting digital assets and reducing potential liability exposures.”
QCC is a consultancy specialising in incident response. Its advisers deliver a range of services to businesses to counter computer crime and to provide security incident response, risk assessment, computer forensics, counter surveillance, bug sweeping and training. ACE clients will have access to QCC advisers to help the company’s management team develop an effective crisis strategy for the containment and controlled dissemination of incident information, both within the organisation and, even more importantly, to the outside world.
Neil Hare-Brown from QCC commented: “Effective response and management of a crisis is key to the overall management of risk, be it operational, financial or reputational. Often it is an aggregation of lower severity incidents which result in the greatest loss. Insurance and effective response form a perfect solution in assisting organisations to significantly reduce the impact of incidents and we are proud to partner with ACE in this initiative”.