Aon launches data centre exposure tool

AON has launched an analytics tool that will help insurers to map data centre exposures.

The Digital Infrastructure Risk Aggregator measures where a portfolio covers data facilities, allowing insurers to highlight localities where they have several large policies covering the same or adjacent facilities.

The tool can also indicate where insurers have room to expand their underwriting of information technology sites and operations.

Dave Nicholson, global client leader for reinsurance, said the new service “helps clients identify concentration risk, benchmark their market position and shape underwriting, reinsurance and capital strategies with greater clarity and confidence”.

He added the tool would help to “mobilise capital and make risk quantifiable, investible and transferable”.

Aon recently began operating a risk analytics tool which calculates future insurance exposures, including risks from data infrastructure.

The explosion in data centre construction has proved challenging to the re/insurance sector. Individual installations can cost up to $20bn. These can involve different enterprises and several operational functions, and require multiple varieties of property, casualty and specialty cover.

Aon estimates that there is already $13bn in insurance covering data centres, and believes this will rise to $29bn by 2030, involving $7.1trn in property and services.

Insurers may hold different tranches of cover across different owners, lessors and facilities, while reinsurers assume parts of these risks in aggregated contracts one step removed from the costly infrastructure being insured.

Last week, Verisk introduced its own database of more than 2,500 data centres across the US.

Like Aon, Verisk’s aim is to help re/insurers calculate potential losses, by providing information about the composition and location of data centres.