hmm... seems like great promises but will getting back a few $$$ really make me feel better about the cloud services I use if they go down?
Sounds similar to an SLA but across many services
Sounds similar to an SLA but across many services
Its a problem. When things go wrong and your customers get hurt, you should be doing more than giving them more of your services for free.
The short answer is that compensation will be initially capped to a predetermined level, at least at first, because there is still so much that we cannot yet quantify properly.
The long answer is that insurance is based on the notion that we as cloud insurance providers can properly and accurately calculate the costs of certain events (data loss/downtime) happening on a group basis for a corporate consumer. But it's really hard to calculate the costs on an individual basis, so asking an individual consumer to quantify their estimated losses for the downtime/data loss they have experienced is always going to make everybody's headache, you can imagine the calls with the loss adjusters.
As cloud providers (both founders are cloud providers), we know exactly how much downtime, data loss we have suffered from historically, I consider this inside information almost, but it's not enough data.
We can also scrape the interwebs for any publicly available information on critical events occurring, we can gather as many data points as we possibly can, but ultimately it is still not enough to provide us with the risk visibility that we need to properly start calculating costs to an individual level, we need more data and lots of it.
Only when we have large pools of insured cloud consumers to measure over a period of time, will we begin to become properly informed on the true costs of downtime, data loss and cyber-attack on a group and individual basis.
Eventually, I can see cloud insurance becoming just another form of insurance like any other, the risks understood and quantified accurately on a group basis, but we still have a long way to go until we get there.
For the foreseeable future, expect capped compensation and plenty of data gathering from the emerging cloud insurance industry.
It’s a brand new field of insurance, we have yet to work everything out properly to the point where we understand it at scale, but we are making great progress and I think we have a head start on the traditional insurance industry being cloud providers and industry insiders.
I hope that I answered it to your satisfaction, I was really hoping somebody would post about us here so we could get the really hard questions we are looking for, HN is the place I come to feel stupid and if anyone asks us the hard questions, I knew it was going to be you guys.