SMB Cyber Insurance: Why Only 4% Buy — Myths, Budgets & Better Options (with Eric Cernak)

Kurt Suhs, Founder and CEO of Concierge Cyber, unpacks why cyber insurance adoption remains low and what businesses are actually doing instead.

Learn how businesses think about risk when they don’t have coverage and why complexity and policy structure are major barriers.

Cyber risk management is often framed as a choice between prevention and insurance. In reality, the most resilient organizations combine both.
In this episode of The SafeHouse, Jeff Edwards speaks with Michael Phillips, Global Head of Cyber at Coalition, about how insurers evaluate cyber risk and why mitigation and insurance must work together.

Building on a previous discussion about the elements of risk management, the conversation explores how underwriters think about cyber exposure, what signals insurers look for when assessing organizations, and why operational resilience is becoming central to modern cyber insurance.

The result is a practical discussion about how businesses should approach cyber risk today.

Cyber risk management is often discussed in technical language. But at its core, risk is financial.

In this episode of The SafeHouse Podcast, Jeff Edwards interviews Davis Hake of Venable to break down how cyber risk should be measured, communicated, and quantified inside organizations.

For CISOs, risk managers, brokers, underwriters, and resilience professionals, this episode provides a practical framework for thinking about cyber exposure beyond compliance checklists.

If you want to understand cyber risk in terms that boards and CFOs actually respond to, this conversation is essential listening.

Federal cybersecurity responsibility has shifted to the states. What happens next?

In this episode of The SafeHouse Podcast, Jeff Edwards welcomes James Saunders, Chief Information Security Officer for the State of Maryland, for a deep conversation on state-level cybersecurity, resilience, and leadership.

James walks through his path from early technical support roles to federal cybersecurity leadership and now to protecting Maryland’s digital ecosystem. He explains Maryland’s IT Master Plan, the state’s five-pillar cybersecurity strategy, and how partnerships, talent, and resilience come together in practice.

This episode offers a behind-the-scenes look at how cybersecurity decisions are made at scale, how states collaborate with one another, and why taking care of people matters as much as taking care of systems.

Kirsten Bay, CEO and co-founder of Cysurance, explains why warranties are becoming a critical layer in cyber risk management. Bay explains how AI-driven cyber certification can help organizations predict where risk is most likely to surface, prevent disruption before it becomes a claim, and protect both insureds and carriers by creating clear, defensible signals of cyber maturity.

Ryan Ettridge, CEO of CyberCert, tackles a problem many organizations struggle with – cybersecurity frameworks that look good on paper but feel overwhelming or unusable in practice.
Ryan explains how AI-driven cyber certification can help organizations predict where risk is most likely to surface, prevent disruption before it becomes a claim, and protect both insureds and carriers by creating clear, defensible signals of cyber maturity.
Chart a clear path from path from compliance to real-world readiness with fundamentals covered in this episode.