The Rise of Cloud Downtime Insurance and the Role of Proven Data Backup and Recovery Solutions

The Uptime Institute’s 2022 Outage Analysis found that 80 percent of data center managers and operators have experienced some type of outage in the past three years. The same study found that cloud, hosting, colocation, and other IT providers accounted for 63 percent of all significant public outages. But here’s what really hurts. ITIC’s 2021 Hourly Cost of Downtime survey found that a single hour of unplanned downtime costs $300,000 or more for 91 percent of mid-sized enterprises.

Another recent article lists the seven biggest cloud outages of the past year. At the top of the list is the AWS cloud outage that caused traffic delays or site shutdowns worldwide for about seven hours. Google Cloud wasn’t immune either, going down in mid-November and taking Home Depot, Snapchat, Etsy, Discord, and Spotify with it.

The Rise of Cloud Downtime Insurance

These statistics are why we found a recent Insurancejournal.com article titled How Cloud Downtime Insurance Became a Thing of great interest. The article credits the founders of Parametrix Insurance for coming up with the idea to provide coverage for clients for short-term outages, network crashes, and platform failures that last up to 12 to 24 hours.

A Parametrix co-founder is quoted as saying that the product was conceived with the understanding that everything was moving to the cloud. The company was surprised that this risk wasn’t covered before it started operating in the space. They also saw that this transition created a vast coverage gap because downtime and other risks were excluded and restricted from most insurance policies.

Parametrix recognized that it needed reliable data on outages to develop models to assess downtime risks. Before offering the coverage, the company’s first order of business was to create monitoring systems that independently verify uptime and downtime for cloud and other enterprise technologies. These include software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) systems.   

Here's where it gets interesting. According to the Insurancejournal.com article, cloud downtime coverage is usually $100,000 to $5 million for an annual policy, can start as soon as an hour after a downtime event's start, and lasts up to 12 to 24 hours. That could add up to a significant amount of money still well spent when you consider that typical cybersecurity insurance policies have a waiting period of 12 hours or more and only cover specific losses.

We still believe cybersecurity insurance may be worth considering as a hedge against data loss and downtime’s financial impacts. But the best way to avoid downtime costs is to reduce them as much as possible. That’s where proven data backup and recovery solutions come in.

Unified Data Protection: Fast Recovery Equals Less Downtime

Arcserve UDP delivers on the promise of reduced downtime with comprehensive data protection and cybersecurity for your critical backup infrastructure. Safeguarded by Sophos Intercept X Advanced cybersecurity, it is the only product that combines deep-learning server protection, immutable storage, and scalable onsite and offsite business continuity. The result is complete resiliency for your virtual, physical, and cloud infrastructures.

Thanks to its orchestrated recovery capabilities, you can minimize downtime with Arcserve UDP, reducing your recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTOs/RPOs) to minutes while validating service level agreements (SLAs) with Assured Recovery™. Recover your data faster, too, with instant virtual machine (VM) and bare metal recovery (BMR) and local and remote virtual standby.

You can also count on application-consistent backup and granular restore, hardware snapshot support, and extensions that deliver high availability and support tape backups. It’s easy to use, managed from a single console and simplifies running hybrid environments with on-premises, virtual, and SaaS-based applications and systems.

Protection Across Platforms

Arcserve UDP offers data protection across a broad range of platforms, including:

• Amazon EC2
• Microsoft Azure
• Windows
• Linux
• Office 365 (Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business)
• Microsoft Exchange
• MS SQL
• File servers,
• Microsoft IIS
• Microsoft Active Directory
• Oracle Database with native RMAN support
• VMware vSphere (agentless
• Microsoft Hyper-V (agentless
• Supports Nutanix Objects and Nutanix Files for protection of Nutanix HCI

Insurance Doesn’t Ensure Your Data is Protected

While every organization is different, it’s worth taking a closer look at cybersecurity insurance and even the new cloud downtime insurance policies. Regardless of your decision, better data protection and recovery capabilities can keep downtime to a minimum and possibly result in lower premiums if you choose to buy any insurance. That makes it an investment that will likely pay for itself in a single incident. Of course, the peace of mind it gives you is priceless.

See the difference Arcserve UDP can make by checking out our free 30-day trial. If you’d like expert help in putting a data protection and downtime deterring solution in place, talk to an Arcserve technology partner.