Industrial organizations with operations technology (OT) and industrial control systems (ICS) tend to experience cyber risk differently than office-only or data-centric enterprises. When a cyber event interrupts production, the loss is often dominated by availability, downtime, and cascading dependency failures—the very areas the cyber insurance market is increasingly focused on as it heads into 2026.
Gallagher’s 2026 Cyber Insurance Market Outlook describes a cyber market that is mostly buyer-friendly (increased capacity, declining rates overall in recent periods), yet increasingly shaped by systemic-risk awareness—driven by recent cloud outages and supply chain attacks that are pushing underwriting toward an “inflection point.”
The OT/ICS-specific implications and recommendations throughout reflect DeNexus analysis of market signals discussed in Gallagher’s report; they are not recommendations issued by Gallagher.
For industrial/OT/ICS and critical infrastructure operators, that combination—more capacity, but more concern about correlated outage scenarios—has one practical implication from DeNexus’ perspective:
Better cyber risk quantification is the lever that converts industrial cyber exposure into scalable, underwriteable, and reinsurable risk.
Gallagher notes that underwriters have been “continually reminded of the potential of systemic risks,” citing recent cloud outages and supply chain attacks as key drivers of that concern.
DeNexus’ Industrial/OT/ICS relevance: OT environments may not be directly “in the cloud,” but industrial operations increasingly depend on cloud-hosted services (identity, SaaS, vendor support portals, code repositories, update pipelines). A cloud or key vendor outage can quickly become a plant-level availability event, depending on the level of IT-OT convergence and integration (which is increasing YoY). The underwriting problem is not just “Will you get hit?” but “How many insureds get hit at once, and for how long?”
That “how long” becomes a financial quantification question—especially because the report highlights emerging structures where (re)insurance risk transfer structures—especially parametric reinsurance—where payouts can be triggered by predefined parameters such as outage duration (more on that below).
Gallagher describes 2025 supply chain attacks as persistent, typically targeting technology vendors and managed service providers; by infiltrating one provider, threat actors can impact “potentially thousands of victims” with a single attack. The report highlights activity involving SaaS companies, cloud providers, and code repository companies, including compromises of software updates, API integrations, and authentication tokens.
DeNexus’ Industrial/ICS/OT relevance: this is the blueprint for correlated operational disruption—especially where plants and sites share common vendors (hardware, software, and service providers). The report explicitly emphasizes vendor risk management and assessing “the business impact of an outage at key third-party vendors.”
That line—business impact of outage—is the opening to financial quantification: if you cannot translate vendor dependency into credible downtime and loss estimates, you will struggle to secure broad terms and meaningful limits.
In its threat actor overview, the report notes an actor (“Interlock”) launching attacks against victims in government and manufacturing sectors.
DeNexus’ Industrial/ICS/OT relevance: while the report is not an OT-specific threat report, that explicit reference matters because it aligns with what many industrial risk leaders already see—manufacturing is not merely collateral; it is targeted due to IT-OT dependencies and supply chain impacts. Dragos and Kaspersky quarterly ICS reports also support that Manufacturing continues to have the most cyber incidents. Underwriters will increasingly want evidence-based answers to: What happens to your manufacturing and ICS/OT operations when IT is disrupted?
Gallagher states that threats against critical infrastructure remain a top priority at the federal level and that CIRCIA imposes a 72-hour incident reporting mandate, with the implementing rulemaking targeted for finalization by May 2026 (timing subject to the regulatory process). It also notes that state-level cybersecurity bills introduced in 2025 commonly focused on data breach notification, ransomware defense, critical infrastructure protections, and privacy protections, with enforcement ramping up.
DeNexus’ Industrial/ICS/OT relevance: regardless of the exact OT architecture, faster reporting timelines increase the premium on (a) detection, (b) scoping, and (c) defensible impact assessment. That impact assessment is also a quantification input—because “what happened” and “what it cost” become foundational data for future underwriting credibility.
Gallagher’s market-growth narrative is ambitious: it cites forecasts where the 2025 cyber market size of $16–$20B could scale to $30–$50B by 2030. It also attributes pricing retreat and competitive conditions partly to carrier growth pressure.
Industrial/critical infrastructure is a major “next increment” opportunity for that growth—but only if the market can price, structure, and reinsure cyber-physical outage exposure with confidence. DeNexus infers several mechanisms that imply stronger quantification:
Gallagher notes that integrating advanced technologies such as AI and machine learning into loss modeling and risk assessment “could further enhance the efficiency and accuracy” of reinsurance solutions, analyzing large data volumes to identify trends and vulnerabilities.
DeNexus’ Industrial/ICS/OT implication: the market is signaling that underwriting is moving toward data-driven, model-supported decisions—not just questionnaire-based hygiene checks. For OT/ICS-heavy insureds, that means the differentiator becomes: can you translate operational dependencies and resilience measures into modeled loss reduction?
Gallagher highlights parametric reinsurance where payouts are triggered by predefined parameters “such as outage duration as opposed to actual losses,” to streamline claim adjudication.
DeNexus’ Industrial/ICS/OT implication: outage duration is often the key driver of industrial loss. But the market will not confidently write more limit (or broaden BI/CBI terms) unless it can credibly estimate outage distributions by scenario class—cloud/system failure, supply chain compromise, ransomware-driven IT disruption, etc. In other words, duration-based triggers and broader capacity require better measurement.
The report cites innovation such as insurance-linked securities (ILS) and catastrophic bonds (CAT bonds) designed to trigger payouts after extreme cyber events.
DeNexus’ Industrial/ICS/OT implication: third-party capital typically demands clearer parametric reinsurance definitions, better event characterization, and more transparent aggregation controls. OT/ICS risk is not inherently “uninsurable”; it is often under-quantified, which makes it harder to package, reinsure, and scale.
The Gallagher report does not heavily use OT/ICS terminology, but it repeatedly emphasizes themes that are operationally central to industrial risk:
DeNexus Recommendation: If you want to “unlock” better outcomes in the insurance market—more limit, better BI/CBI alignment to operational realities, fewer coverage frictions—the strategy is to build an OT-aware quantification narrative that answers the questions the report implies underwriters and reinsurers are now prioritizing:
Gallagher portrays a cyber market with growth pressure, expanding capacity, and active innovation—yet also heightened sensitivity to correlated, systemic loss pathways. That is exactly the environment where industrial/critical infrastructure insureds can either (a) be constrained by conservative assumptions, or (b) differentiate themselves with credible, scenario-based cyber risk quantification that makes downtime and dependency risk legible to insurance capital.
For organizations looking to make that quantification repeatable and decision-ready, platforms such as DeNexus DeRISK CRQ are designed to translate OT cyber exposures into business metrics (including the financial impact of potential cyber events) and support risk mitigation simulations that help prioritize controls and investments.
In 2026, the industrial cyber conversation is increasingly less about whether you have “good controls,” and more about whether you can measure operational cyber exposure in a way that underwriters and reinsurers can confidently scale.
Original source: Gallagher, 2026 Cyber Insurance Market Outlook (PDF): https://www.ajg.com/-/media/files/gallagher/us/news-and-insights/2025/2026-cyber-insurance-market-outlook.pdf