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IT service outage cost: case study and implications for cyber insurance
RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Digital Systems, Mobility and Systems.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-2017-7914
2020 (English)In: Geneva papers on risk and insurance. Issues and practice, ISSN 1018-5895, E-ISSN 1468-0440, Vol. 45, p. 760-784Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

Today, almost all enterprises are highly dependent on IT services. Thus, high availability IT services and the cost of downtime have received a lot of attention in recent years. One increasingly used tool for cyber risk management and transfer is cyber insurance, which typically offers some form of business interruption coverage. However, cost structures of IT service outages are still poorly understood, as costs are often just reported as lump sums. This article contributes a multiple case study of IT service outage cost in three sectors in Sweden: transport companies (N= 11), food companies (N= 9) and government agencies (N= 19). The contribution is three-fold: (i) the measurement instrument itself, (ii) the insights into different cost structures gained, and (iii) the implications of different cost structures on availability investment strategies. Whereas some enterprises incur only a fixed outage cost, some incur (almost) only lost productivity or almost only lost revenue. In the public sector, lost revenue is often negligible. The results are further contextualised by a discussion of cyber insurance implications.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Palgrave Macmillan , 2020. Vol. 45, p. 760-784
Keywords [en]
Availability investment, Business interruption, Cyber insurance, Fixed and variable cost, IT service availability, Outage cost
National Category
Natural Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:ri:diva-45635DOI: 10.1057/s41288-020-00177-4Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85087966644OAI: oai:DiVA.org:ri-45635DiVA, id: diva2:1458007
Note

Funding details: Myndigheten för Samhällsskydd och Beredskap, MSB, 2015-6986; Funding details: Myndigheten för Samhällsskydd och Beredskap, MSB; Funding text 1: Acknowledgements This work was supported by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency, MSB, agreement no. 2015-6986. Not only did MSB function as the funding agency, it was also instrumental in securing access to the public-private fora where many respondents were recruited. The author is grateful for this, in particular to Johan Turell, who facilitated these contacts. Thanks are also due to Professor Shaun S. Wang of the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore for discussions about availability investment allocation problems.

Available from: 2020-08-13 Created: 2020-08-13 Last updated: 2025-09-23Bibliographically approved

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Franke, Ulrik

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