ACE Partners with Incident Response Specialists QCC to Protect Businesses' Reputations against Data and Network Failures

ACE is responding to a survey of senior European risk managers inwhich 90% cited protecting the corporate reputation of their businessas their key priority. Survey respondents identified securitybreaches, including sensitive data leaks and hacking of customer dataas one of the major threats to corporate reputation. The researchconducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and sponsored byACE, also found that 84% of those questioned felt that threats totheir corporate reputation had increased over the last five years. Asmany as 50% of those surveyed reported that their organisation hadalready suffered financial losses as a result of damage to theircorporate reputation.

Shaun Cooper, ACE's senior network risk underwriter, said:'Reputational risk is the single biggest challenge facing businessestoday and network risk is a key threat to corporate reputation. ACE'snetwork risk Dataguard product helps clients mitigate risk in thisarea. However, through our new partnership with QCC, we can alsoprovide clients with a holistic solution to protecting digital assetsand reducing potential liability exposures."

QCC is a consultancy specialising in incident response. Itsadvisers deliver a range of services to businesses to counter computercrime and to provide security incident response, risk assessment,computer forensics, counter surveillance, bug sweeping and training.ACE clients will have access to QCC advisers to help the company'smanagement team develop an effective crisis strategy for thecontainment and controlled dissemination of incident information, bothwithin the organisation and, even more importantly, to the outsideworld.

Neil Hare-Brown from QCC commented: "Effective response andmanagement of a crisis is key to the overall management of risk, be itoperational, financial or reputational. Often it is an aggregation oflower severity incidents which result in the greatest loss. Insuranceand effective response form a perfect solution in assistingorganisations to significantly reduce the impact of incidents and weare proud to partner with ACE in this initiative".