Most businesses budget for the ransom and forget the wages. Here is what it costs while nothing works.
Whatever figure you just generated, that is the kind of loss a cyber policy exists for. Which raises the only question that matters on the day.
When something goes wrong, an insurer does not ask whether you bought a policy. They ask what controls were actually in place, whether they were maintained, and when you knew. Those are questions about your environment, not your paperwork.
The market data makes the same point in dollars. An Australian breach found and contained in under 200 days costs an average of $3.26 million. The same breach found slowly costs $5.17 million. Nearly two million dollars of difference, decided by nothing except how fast you knew.
That is why inSUPPORT coordinates the insurance and the IT as one thing. Not because it is tidier, but because the evidence an insurer wants is produced by the team running your systems, or it is not produced at all. Cover is always subject to the insurer's assessment, and no provider can promise an outcome. What we can do is make sure that when the question is asked, you have the answer.
Everything here is arithmetic on published figures. No estimates, no vendor statistics.
$70 per hour. ABS Average Weekly Earnings, November 2025: full-time adult ordinary time earnings of $2,051.10 a week. Over a 38 hour week that is about $54 an hour before on-costs, roughly $70 with superannuation, payroll tax, workers compensation and leave.
7.6 hours. A standard Australian full-time working day.
24 days. The commonly reported average business downtime following a ransomware attack.
$3.26m versus $5.17m. IBM and the Ponemon Institute, Cost of a Data Breach, Australian figures, for breaches contained under versus over 200 days.
The maths. People times hourly cost times 7.6 hours times days, plus any hourly revenue you enter. You can check it on a napkin.
What this deliberately leaves out: the cost of recovery, penalties, and reputational damage. Australian breaches average $4.22 million all in. This shows the operating cost only, because that is the part nobody argues with.
