

Cloud Insurance for consumers: Is this for real? - hangulo
http://cloudsurance.com/

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vDesktop
Hi there, co-founder @guisebule reporting in!

It is absolutely real and I personally believe that the lack of cloud
insurance in the cloud computing world is a scandal waiting to happen. Dropbox
and Box have tens of millions of customers between them, but they fail to
offer a proper SLA to most of them or protect them against worst case
scenarios properly by insuring against the obvious risks.

Think about that, millions of small businesses with their files in the cloud,
but no protection against worst case scenarios. Its a problem guys, we are
going to try and fix it.

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vDesktop
For those interested, I post on Medium about this subject about why I think
this is the most important conversation in cloud computing right now, it will
provide context.

[https://medium.com/@guisebule/dropbox-
box-887adfa7217b](https://medium.com/@guisebule/dropbox-box-887adfa7217b)

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hangulo
hmm... seems like great promises but will getting back a few $$$ really make
me feel better about the cloud services I use if they go down?

Sounds similar to an SLA but across many services

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vDesktop
The difference being that cloud insurance will actually compensate you if the
worst happens. Right now, the most an SLA will give you is service credits.

Its a problem. When things go wrong and your customers get hurt, you should be
doing more than giving them more of your services for free.

~~~
hangulo
Obviously like the concept but still quite skeptical. What onus would be on me
as the user to show you how much it hurt my business that gmail was down for
instance? Will you re-imburse me for my usual MRR I would have gained that
day?

~~~
vDesktop
That’s a great question, its one we struggled with for months and we are still
refining the details of the future offering.

The short answer is that compensation will be initially capped to a
predetermined level, at least at first, because there is still so much that we
cannot yet quantify properly.

The long answer is that insurance is based on the notion that we as cloud
insurance providers can properly and accurately calculate the costs of certain
events (data loss/downtime) happening on a group basis for a corporate
consumer. But it's really hard to calculate the costs on an individual basis,
so asking an individual consumer to quantify their estimated losses for the
downtime/data loss they have experienced is always going to make everybody's
headache, you can imagine the calls with the loss adjusters.

As cloud providers (both founders are cloud providers), we know exactly how
much downtime, data loss we have suffered from historically, I consider this
inside information almost, but it's not enough data.

We can also scrape the interwebs for any publicly available information on
critical events occurring, we can gather as many data points as we possibly
can, but ultimately it is still not enough to provide us with the risk
visibility that we need to properly start calculating costs to an individual
level, we need more data and lots of it.

Only when we have large pools of insured cloud consumers to measure over a
period of time, will we begin to become properly informed on the true costs of
downtime, data loss and cyber-attack on a group and individual basis.

Eventually, I can see cloud insurance becoming just another form of insurance
like any other, the risks understood and quantified accurately on a group
basis, but we still have a long way to go until we get there.

For the foreseeable future, expect capped compensation and plenty of data
gathering from the emerging cloud insurance industry.

It’s a brand new field of insurance, we have yet to work everything out
properly to the point where we understand it at scale, but we are making great
progress and I think we have a head start on the traditional insurance
industry being cloud providers and industry insiders.

I hope that I answered it to your satisfaction, I was really hoping somebody
would post about us here so we could get the really hard questions we are
looking for, HN is the place I come to feel stupid and if anyone asks us the
hard questions, I knew it was going to be you guys.

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vDesktop
Seriously though, somebody ask us a question we do not know the answer to. Why
do you think I am here?

