CTO Circle - Cyber Risk: Protect or Insure?

🔵 Digital Innovation · 🪑 Roundtable · 🔒 Exclusive

CTO Circle 4 – Cyber Risk: Protect or Insure?

You can invest more in cybersecurity. You can transfer part of the risk through insurance.

But where is the right balance?

Across the first three CTO Circles, we explored how much security is enough, how to build more robust technology, and how to manage risk across the value chain.

For this final session, we’ll bring these questions together and look at one key decision: what should you protect, what should you accept, and what should you transfer through insurance?

Starting from a real-world case, we’ll tackle four practical questions:

1. How does your actual level of protection impact your insurability?

Which security controls do insurers expect? How do your maturity and risk exposure affect coverage, conditions and premiums?

2. Does compliance mean you are sufficiently protected — and insurable?

NIS2, ISO 27001, DORA… Where do compliance, actual resilience and insurers’ expectations converge — and where do they differ?

3. Where should protection stop — and insurance begin?

Not every risk can be eliminated. Which risks should you mitigate, accept or transfer?

Where is the next euro better spent: on additional protection or insurance?

4. Will your insurance actually protect you when it matters?

When an incident becomes a claim, could you demonstrate that the controls and processes you declared were actually in place? What evidence would you need — before the incident happens?

The objective is not to discuss insurance policies in isolation, but to put insurance back into the broader cyber risk equation:

What do you protect? What do you accept? What do you transfer? And how do you make that trade-off deliberately?

About the CTO Circle

A confidential peer-to-peer discussion for CTOs and Senior Technology Leaders from companies active in the digital sector.

15 participants maximum. Participation is subject to approval to keep the group relevant and allow for meaningful exchanges between peers.

This event is organized with the support of Wallonie Entreprendre, in accordance with the de minimis Regulation.