Rodney Adriko
About
Rodney Adriko is a postgraduate researcher in Cyber Security at the University of Kent. Prior to joining Kent, Rodney was an industry practitioner for over 8 years in various aspects of technology and cyber risk consulting in the Big 4 and key players in the Financial Services sector. For his research on Cyber Insurance, Rodney was awarded the Chartered Institute of Information Security (CIISec) Student Project of the Year Award (2022) and nominated for the inaugural Fred Piper Awards.
My PhD research attempts to investigate how cyber insurance adoption can be increased in SMEs and ways through which cyber insurance can have a greater impact on SMEs. It examines the field of cyber insurance and assesses its benefits that are most appropriate/impactful for SMEs within their risk management framework and explores the challenges faced by SMEs in their quest for cyber insurance. Additionally, it evaluates whether cyber insurance can incentivise better security behaviour in SMEs in support of their risk management effort leading to an overall good security posture.
Organisations all over the world are continuing to enhance their risk treatment effort through the transfer of risk to third parties like insurers by purchasing cyber insurance to cushion them from the effects of cyber incidents. It is often that insurers will require companies seeking cyber insurance to implement cyber security controls in their IT environment to lower their risk level and subsequently obtain reduced premiums due to a perceived lower level of risk. The rate of penetration of cyber insurance in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) has been relatively slow with many of them exposed without cover. By examining the challenges faced by SMEs in acquiring Cyber Insurance, we hope to develop a comprehensive framework of guidance to allow SMEs to engage more with cyber insurance so that they can reap from the benefits of risk transfer through insurance.
Research interests
I am interested in how organizations mitigate risk through risk transfer to other parties like insurers. I research how SMEs use and understand cyber insurance, what they perceive of cyber insurance and how they can be incentivized to embrace risk transfer to supplement their risk management effort and enhance cyber security posture.