If you run your own business you probably have business insurance in place to cover the cost of repairing or replacing your building and other business assets if they get damaged or destroyed. But do you take the time to regularly review your cover to ensure all aspects of your business are properly protected?
Here are our top tips to help make sure you don’t leave your business vulnerable in the event of a disaster striking.
Each year when your insurance renews, think about how your business has changed. Has turnover increased? Do you employ more people? Have you purchased more equipment, machinery or vehicles? Make sure you amend cover to take any changes into account. Under-insurance is a common problem and often only comes to light when you come to make a claim and discover your protection is inadequate.
As well as covering physical assets, have you considered insurance for any downtime, which could occur if any physical damage meant you were forced to stop trading for a period of time? This type of cover is called Business Interruption insurance and is designed to compensate you for loss of business income. Again, under-insurance is a common problem. It’s easy to under-estimate downtime because business owners are overly optimistic about how quickly they think they will be up and running again. In reality, it can take two years to get back up to pre-disaster levels, so make sure your level of insurance reflects this.
An area that many businesses fail to protect is their data, IT systems and online presence. This is despite the fact that cyber attacks are a growing threat to businesses and are perhaps more likely to strike a business than fire, flooding or theft. Just in the last few days the government has issued an alert warning that it is investigating a large scale hijacking campaign which is expected to have global impact. While it’s not expected to affect UK businesses, they have published a guide which sets out the signs to look out for.
To date, the UK has been hit with seven high profile cyber attacks, the worst of which was in 2017 and targeted the NHS.
Most business insurance policies don’t cover cyber attacks. Separate cyber insurance is, therefore, an important consideration if your data is an important element of your business – and, let’s face it, this is the case for the majority of businesses today.
Our final, and perhaps most important tip of all, is to take expert advice. Use an insurance broker to help you find the right insurance for your business and use the services of a disaster recovery specialist, such as First Recovery, to get your business back up and running fast if disaster does strike.