Telecom giant AT&T’s SBU AT&T Insurance Agency have joined hands with insurance firms Lockton Affinity and CNA Financial to provide full range security services and cyber security insurance. With this alliance, customers of AT&T Insurance will have access to policies underwritten by CNA and brokered by Lockton.
According to AT&T, recuperating data after cyber disruptions has been the biggest challenge for small-medium enterprises. They say that in addition to recuperation, monitoring anomalies and discrepancies in their hosting environments have also been equally tough tasks for SMBs.
By teaming up with insurance firms CNA and Lockton Affinity, AT&T claim that together they will provide AT&T’s customers with a complete range of cyber risk management solutions to help them fully mitigate, monitor, measure and transfer security threats. They also claim that the consortium will help targetted SMBs combat ransomware, malware, phishing and botnet attacks.
Speaking about the deal, Danessa Lambdin, Vice President of Cybersecurity Solutions for AT&T Business, commented:
Even the largest enterprises struggle with how to resource multi-layered cybersecurity needs.
Without a dedicated team, financial resources, or both, small and mid-sized businesses are prioritizing threat prevention and detection activities at the expense of response and recovery.
By offering our customers a combination of cybersecurity technologies and access to broad cyber insurance through CNA, we’re providing them with more options to help protect themselves and recover from cyber-attacks.
AT&T say that when SMBs will be acquiring threat detection tools, they will be offering cyber security insurance in a bundled deal to their customers. They added that this change in addressing cyber issues faced by SMBs will help AT&T penetrate different industries.
Patrick O’Farrell, President of Lockton Affinity, commented:
With the number of small and mid-size businesses in the U.S. numbering in the tens of millions, the gap in broad solutions needed for them to address cybersecurity recovery was unexpectedly significant.
This cybersecurity policy could be the difference between businesses closing the door for good, and continued success.
Experts of the IT world are pleasantly surprised with this different route taken by AT&T to address cyber security woes of SMBs. It will be interesting to see how things unfold for AT&T with this alliance, especially after they consolidated their security prowess with AlienVault’s acquisition.