In a January post in this link, I posed the question as to whether software developers were prosecution proof. This is of course in line with the decisions they make in creating mission critical software applications. Doctors have been sued for similar occurrences or even top managers. Therefor in a continuation of that line of thought its to think in this direction; can organizations insure against downtime?
According to wikipedia, downtime is
The term downtime is used to refer to periods when a system is unavailable. Downtime or outage duration refers to a period of time that a system fails to provide or perform its primary function
Downtime can either be planned or simply as a result of unavoidable circumstances. For instance is a company offers some online service and then they are hacked(just an example) then their clients will not be able to access those service until full restoration is done. The total amount of time that the system or service is unavailable is the downtime period.
During that period both the clients and affected company lose alot. The client for starters maybe lose their patience! Definitely there is the loss of revenue and even of more importance; reputation. A company known to be a victim of downtime will not rank to well when listed against its competitors.
That is the basis of the discussion we all need to be having. If IT managers foresee an inevitable downtime, can they insure against that. Or probably the question we need to be asking is, do the Insurance companies have products that can cushion the information economies against incidences that result in unavailability of information? Is it too early to start asking for the products if they dont exist?
This is my view, If a business sells some tangible goods and then they are stolen, then that forms a candidate for insurance. Therefore if a company delivers information using systems and then a hacker tampers with the availability of the service then that too should be a candidate for insurance.