Cyber insurance used to be a short form and a check. Now the renewal application is a security questionnaire, and the answers you give are binding. For construction and trades companies, this catches a lot of owners off guard: the questions assume controls that generic IT support never put in place.
Why insurers started asking
Payouts for ransomware and wire fraud climbed, so insurers pushed the risk back onto policyholders. If you attest that you have a control and you don't, you can jeopardize coverage or complicate a claim depending on the policy language, and in construction, where a single fraudulent wire can be six figures, that's the exact scenario you bought the policy for.
Ransomware factored into roughly a quarter of breaches in Verizon's 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report and touched the large majority of industries, which is much of why insurers now scrutinize backups, EDR, and MFA so closely. (Verizon DBIR)
The controls a renewal usually asks about
- Multi-factor authentication (MFA): on email, remote access, and admin accounts. This is the single most common hard requirement.
- Endpoint detection and response (EDR): managed, not just consumer antivirus.
- Backups that are tested: ideally offline or immutable, so ransomware can't encrypt them too.
- Email filtering against phishing and business email compromise.
- Patch management: operating systems and software kept current.
- Security awareness training for staff.
- An incident response plan: what you do, and who you call, when something happens.
What this means practically
Most contractors can answer "yes" honestly to all of these only once a managed IT provider has put the controls in place and can document them. The documentation is the part people underestimate; an insurer (or a claim adjuster later) may ask for evidence, not just a checkbox. A provider who maintains that evidence turns renewal season from a scramble into a form you fill out in an afternoon.
Part of our guide to IT for construction and trades companies in Northern Virginia. See how Sentry supports construction and trades, or book a free assessment.