While ransomware was the hot topic at 2021 midyear insurance industry conferences, discussions of the broader topic of systemic risk—spurred on by recent hacks of SolarWinds and Microsoft Exchange—had underwriters talking about fixes beyond rate hikes.

One session on cyber insurance trends at the Casualty Actuarial Society Seminar on Reinsurance in June, coincidentally, took place on the same day that an edge cloud platform called Fastly went offline for an hour, taking client sites ranging from news outlets to the U.K. government down in the process. (See related article, “Explaining Just How Fastly Problems Happen“)