The cyber insurance EDR requirement is the question that catches out businesses still leaning on traditional antivirus. Endpoint detection and response has become one of the controls carriers expect to see, and for many it sits just behind MFAin importance. The reason is simple: modern attacks routinely walk straight past signature-based antivirus, and insurers have paid enough of those claims to stop accepting “we have antivirus” as an answer.
Why Antivirus No Longer Counts
Traditional antivirus works by matching files against a list of known threats. That's useful against old, recognised malware— and useless against anything new, customised, or “fileless” that doesn't match a signature. EDR takes a different approach: it watches how an endpoint behaves, flags suspicious activity even when there's no known signature, and can isolate a compromised machine before an intruder spreads.
| Traditional Antivirus | EDR | |
|---|---|---|
| Detects | Known malware by signature | Suspicious behaviour, even with no known signature |
| Novel / fileless attacks | Often missed | Designed to catch them |
| Response | Blocks or quarantines a file | Can isolate the whole device and trace the attack |
| Visibility | Little — pass/fail per file | Full timeline of what happened on the endpoint |
| What insurers think | No longer sufficient on its own | Increasingly expected, ideally monitored |
“Fleet-Wide” Is the Word That Matters
When a carrier asks about EDR, the unspoken second half is “on everything?” EDR on the new laptops but not the aging server, or on the office machines but not the owner's personal device used for work, leaves exactly the blind spot an attacker looks for. Partial EDR deployment gets read the same way as partial MFA — a gap big enough to matter. Fleet-wide means every relevant endpoint: laptops, desktops, and servers alike.
Installed Isn't the Same as Watched
EDR earns its keep by raising alerts — but an alert nobody sees is just a log entry. A detection that fires at 2am, on a weekend, while your team is asleep, only helps if someone is watching and can act. That's why underwriters increasingly ask not just whether EDR is installed but whether it's monitored. For a small business without a 24/7 security team, that's what managed detection and response (MDR) provides: the tool plus the people watching it. We unpack the tooling itself in EDR vs antivirus.
The Same Attestation Rule Applies
As with every control on the form, the EDR answer has to be true. Attesting to fleet-wide EDR you don't actually have — and then suffering a breach on the one device without it — gives a carrier grounds to reduce or deny the claim. Deployed properly and monitored, EDR is both the answer underwriters want and one of the controls most likely to stop an incident becoming a catastrophe. It's a core piece of cyber insurance readiness, alongside the MFA requirement.
Fleet-Wide EDR, Watched Around the Clock
We deploy monitored EDR across every endpoint and document the coverage — so your application's EDR answer is true, and your devices are actually defended.
See Cyber Insurance Readiness