The Annual Risk Health Check: Why Every SME Needs It
Your business can change a lot in a year – expanding, shifting online, hiring staff, or upgrading equipment.
Recent OAIC breach statistics show a jump in reports tied to cloud service providers.
So, for cloud-based businesses, the major exposures are no longer physical events such as fire, theft, or flood. Instead, these have come to the fore:
- Service outages: even short cloud disruptions can halt operations
- Data loss or breaches: including attacks on third-party systems that still leave you responsible under the Privacy Act
- Digital asset gaps: from code to databases, many of these don’t appear on standard policy schedules
General liability or property policies often don’t cover these. Cyber insurance can help, but many standard cyber policies exclude third-party outages unless those are added explicitly. Be sure to check the ASD’s small business cloud security guides.
Why Your Insurance Needs Updating, Not Just Renewing
It’s important that your cover reflects the way you now operate digitally. Key areas to explore include:
- Cloud service interruptions and outage losses
- Cyber privacy or breach liability, including third-party systems
- Errors & omissions / tech liability to protect your code, intellectual property, and client access issues
- Business interruption cover when SLAs fail or systems go offline
- Incident response planning, so you meet policy conditions when things go wrong
- Supply chain cyber dependencies
Cloud Migration is Real and Fast
Australia’s cloud computing market is now valued at about $17 billion in 2025. It continues to expand as businesses pursue flexibility, easier collaboration, and reduced capital spend. SMEs are already using cloud at multiple levels. About 48 percent rely on basics like email or file storage, 41 percent run mid-tier systems such as CRM, and roughly 15 percent experiment with advanced AI-enabled tools.
This digital growth can be a competitive advantage, but without the right protection, it can quickly become a blind spot in your risk planning.
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