Data and system restoration
A first-party cover paying the cost of recovering, recreating or reinstalling data, software and systems damaged by an incident, distinct from the business interruption suffered during the outage.
Restoration cover indemnifies the reasonable and necessary costs of returning the insured's digital assets to their pre-incident condition: recovering data from backups, recreating it from other sources when the backup is missing, reinstalling and reconfiguring systems and applications, and, in recent wordings, reasonable security improvement when a like-for-like restoration would reopen the same flaw. It covers neither the intrinsic economic value of the data, which policies almost always decline to assess, nor lost research and development costs, nor lost business during restoration, which belongs to business interruption cover. For the underwriter, this cover is the one most directly tied to the insured's preparedness: an organization with isolated, tested backups restores in days what another rebuilds in weeks, at incomparable cost and business interruption. Hence the attention questionnaires pay to offline backups, their frequency and the last full restoration test.
Hit by NotPetya in June 2017, the shipping group Maersk reinstalled in about ten days some 4,000 servers, 45,000 workstations and 2,500 applications, and estimated the total cost of the incident at 250 to 300 million dollars. Restoration was only possible thanks to a copy of the domain directory spared by a power outage in an office in Ghana.
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