ZeroDown expands failure gap assessment for insurance risk reviews

ZeroDown Software on September 22 said it is expanding its Failure Gap Assessment to help insureds, brokers and underwriters measure the gap between expected resilience and actual business capability during technology outages. The move aims to bring Business Availability and operational resilience into insurance conversations that have traditionally focused on security controls.

Why it matters: - The insurance industry is increasingly exposed to business interruption risk tied to technology failures, not just cyber attacks. - ZeroDown’s assessment is designed to show whether an organization can keep operating, recover in time, or meet the resilience expectations baked into policies, contracts and customer relationships. - Brokers and underwriters get a way to evaluate operational resilience with more business context and less reliance on control checklists alone.

What happened: - ZeroDown Software expanded its Failure Gap Assessment on Sept. 22, 2026. - The assessment is an executive-level tool meant to compare what leadership expects during a technology disruption with what the organization can actually deliver. - The company framed the rollout around insurance use cases for insureds, brokers and underwriters.

The details: - Traditional cyber risk reviews have focused on controls such as MFA, MDR, endpoint protection, backups and incident response. - ZeroDown said those controls do not necessarily show whether an insured can restore critical business operations within expected timeframes. - The assessment broadens the discussion to Business Availability and Operational Resilience. - It is meant to create a shared framework for technology dependency, downtime exposure, recovery expectations and actual capability. - The tool helps insured organizations translate technical resilience into language executives can use. - For brokers, the assessment is meant to support a stronger evidence-based story about operational resilience and remediation priorities. - For underwriters and carriers, the assessment adds visibility into how an organization may perform when an event occurs, not just whether controls exist. - The company said the assessment is relevant as failures involving applications, cloud infrastructure, third parties and technology providers can create Business Interruption and Technology Errors & Omissions exposures. - The assessment is intended to give leadership, IT, risk management, brokers and insurers a common language for those exposures. - Jeff Edwards, EVP at ZeroDown Software, said leadership often believes the business can recover within a certain period while the people responsible for recovery may be operating with different assumptions. - Edwards said the assessment is meant to expose that disconnect before an actual failure. - Lawrence Baldino, executive partner at LCM Solutions, said assumptions about resilience can create blind spots that only appear during disruption. - Baldino said the assessment provides an evidence-based view of what a business can actually deliver when systems fail.

Between the lines: - ZeroDown is positioning resilience as a measurable insurance risk, not just an IT problem. - That framing could help carriers and brokers ask better questions about outage readiness, recovery timing and the business impact of technology dependency. - The message also reflects a broader shift in risk management toward proving operational capability rather than simply documenting controls. - Edwards described the assessment as a “resilience Rosetta Stone for risk,” signaling an effort to bridge technical and underwriting language.

What’s next: - ZeroDown is likely to push the assessment as a discussion tool in broker and underwriting conversations. - The company is also likely to use the framework to highlight where organizations can improve resilience before a disruptive event occurs. - As technology dependence deepens, similar business-availability metrics may become more common in insurance reviews.

The bottom line: - ZeroDown wants insurers to judge downtime risk by what a business can actually do during disruption, not just by what security controls it has in place. - More information about the company’s broader resilience efforts is available through the SafeHouse Initiative.