Business Liability Insurance for Web-based Businesses

TechInsurance provides General Liability, Errors and Omissions, Workers’ Compensation and additional insurance coverages for Web-based businesses.

Web Business Insurance

Web business insurance protects your business from damage resulting from computer viruses to data or covered systems; attacks to your computer hardware and/or intranet; public disclosure of private information, libel, slander, disparagement, and/or e-business extortion; and copyright infringement and/or theft of data, income, securities, software or computer resources.

Standards for the Web business insurance industry are constantly in development. The American National Standards Institute of New York has proposed procedures that will allow insurers and business partners to exchange data without writing individual application programs for each data exchange. While this will facilitate the eventual standardization of actuarial tables for the industry, ANSI standards are not specifically designed with risk managers' and insurers' data exchanges in mind.

Consequently, the Risk & Insurance Management Society Inc. task force met in 1999 to invite industry insurers and Third-Party Claims Administrators or TPAs to cull data from their respective databases and make a common data reporting form available to their clients. This choice rejected the more costly alternative: a data standard that would transform the way these entities collect and organize data. Standards remain in flux, and the data conversion process has increased system costs and resulted in the loss of risk managers' data analysis opportunities.

Web business insurance premiums are also based on risks unique to the Web business environment. These include networked transactions, changing technologies that transform businesses in a very short period of time, the vulnerability of hardware to software, and short product life cycles. As common data-reporting standards develop, the actuarial tables necessary to standardize premiums across the industry will facilitate comparable premiums. In the meantime, premiums vary from one provider of Web business insurance to another.