Algeria AgencySecurity & surveillance
What the insurer asks for: declaring, proving, being paid
The only third party that will ever examine your security does it once, after the loss. What it will ask for, and what has to exist beforehand.
The companion article ranks this family: what actually happens and in what order, the one-hour question that puts everything back in place, and the order we impose. It answers "where to start".
One question remains that nobody covers: the insurer’s. It is the only third party that will ever examine your security arrangements, it does so once, after the loss, and it does so with a contract in hand.
What we have observed among our clients fits in one sentence: almost everything an insurer asks for had to exist beforehand. So this is not an administrative page, it is a security page, and it is read on a day when nothing has happened.
One point about scope: extracting footage and handing it over are covered by the cameras article. Here we cover only what the insurer asks for on top, and section 3 points at the rest.
The only security audit you will ever undergo
No ten-person business in Algeria is subject to an IT security inspection. Nobody comes to check your passwords, your backup or your cameras, and that is a reality worth facing rather than pretending otherwise.
There is one exception and one only: the day you declare a loss. At that moment somebody examines what you had, what you had declared having, and whether the two match.
That examination covers three things, and not the ones people imagine. Did the arrangement described in the contract actually exist. Was the lost property declared and capable of being valued. And were the declaration deadlines and forms respected.
None of those three can be prepared afterwards. That is what gives this page its point, and it is also why it sits with the security article rather than elsewhere: an insurance file is a revealer of what you actually put in place.
One consequence to accept immediately: this page will not earn you money in premiums, and section 8 says why. It will stop you being paid half for a loss you genuinely suffered, which is a different subject and a commoner one.
The contract nobody has read
This page’s first action asks nothing of anybody: take out your business insurance policy and read four points. You have it, it is in a folder, and in all likelihood nobody has opened it since signature.
The first point is what is covered. IT equipment is very often a separate heading from furniture, with its own ceiling, and that ceiling was set at the moment of subscription — when you had three workstations.
The second is the deductible, which is to say what stays on your side. It is the figure that decides whether a loss is worth declaring at all, and many owners discover it at the moment they declare.
The third is the declaration window, which is short and runs from when you became aware of the loss. The fourth is the list of conditions: the protective measures the contract assumes are in place, and that is section 6.
We will give no figure for any of those four points, and the absence is deliberate. They are written, precise, and different in every policy — publishing an amount here would be quoting somebody else’s contract at a reader who has their own in a drawer. A quarter of an hour’s reading beats any benchmark we could invent.
The first hours: what happens in what order
Declaring has an order, it is short, and following it changes what you will get later.
First the police complaint, for anything involving theft or a deliberate act. The receipt is the document the insurer will ask for first and it cannot be recovered: a complaint filed three days later exists, a complaint filed the same day is something else.
Then the declaration to the insurer, in the form the contract provides for. A phone call is generally not enough; writing, with a date, is what opens the file and starts the other party’s obligations running.
Then photographs, and they have to be taken before the premises are put back in order. That is the step everybody inverts, because the first human reaction to a ransacked room is to tidy it. Take twenty photographs with a phone, wide then close, before touching anything.
Camera footage is handled at the same moment and according to the article devoted to it: protect the period before watching it, export twice, hand over a copy. What the insurer asks for on top is a written description — which camera, which angle, which hours — and it is that description that saves a week.
The inventory: the piece that is always missing
Here is the central section, and it is not about security at all. It is the commonest reason a settlement comes in below the real loss, and it has nothing to do with the insurer.
An insurer indemnifies what can be identified and valued. For IT equipment that means a description, a serial number, a purchase date and an invoice. A business declaring "four laptops" and nothing more describes a loss nobody can value.
The correction is a six-column file and an hour’s work: description, serial number, purchase date, price, location, and the invoice reference. That file already half exists at your accountant’s, on the fixed-asset side, and what it nearly always lacks is the serial numbers.
Two details make all the difference on the day. Serial numbers are read once, off the label on the back of each machine, and copied without ever having to go back. And the file lives **somewhere other** than the business: a theft often takes the machines and the computer that held the list.
It is also the only work on this page that serves something else: this same file is the inventory the equipment-purchase and end-of-life articles talk about, and the maintenance contract in the quarterly review rests on it. You write it once for four uses.
What is not equipment
An IT loss rarely destroys only objects, and the other two losses are handled far worse because nobody knows what to say about them.
The first is business interruption: the days during which you cannot work. It is a separate heading, it is not included by default, and it is quantified from your accounts rather than from the equipment lost.
The second is data loss, and this is where insurance meets the rest of this pillar directly. What is indemnifiable is the **cost of reconstitution** — the hours of re-entry, the recovery from a damaged medium — and not what the data is worth to you.
The consequence is blunt and better seen beforehand: a business whose backup works has a data loss of a few hours’ work, and a business whose backup has never been restored has a loss nothing compensates, because nothing can put a figure on it.
That is what makes the backup-restore article the best insurance policy in this pillar, and we say it in that order deliberately: no contract buys back data that no longer exists.
The contract’s conditions, and the undeclared system
Section 2’s fourth point deserves its own section, because it is the one that produces refusals.
A contract covering theft assumes protective measures, and it lists them: types of lock, the presence of an alarm system, sometimes its connection to a monitoring centre. Those conditions are written down and they are checked after the loss.
The case we see most often is not fraud, it is drift: the contract was signed when the business was in different premises, or before the alarm stopped being maintained, or before the back door was secured with a chain rather than the specified lock.
The reverse case exists and costs money every month: you installed cameras and an alarm and never told your insurer. That does not necessarily reduce the premium — section 8 is clear about that — but an undeclared system cannot improve your position, and it can complicate it if the contract specified something else.
The check is a ten-minute call to your agent, once, with the contract in front of you. Put the question in these terms: does what is written here match what I have today? It is the only question on this page that requires a third party.
Depreciation, and why a four-year-old laptop is worth little
This section avoids a disappointment rather than solving a problem, and it is better read calmly.
Unless a specific clause says otherwise, a settlement takes the age of the property into account. A four-year-old computer is not reimbursed at the price of a new one, and the calculation follows a scale the contract describes.
The practical consequence is not to give up declaring: it is to know beforehand what a loss would actually leave you with. An estate made entirely of five-year-old machines is an estate whose destruction does not fund its replacement, which is management information rather than insurance information.
New-for-old or replacement-value clauses exist, they are asked for at subscription or renewal, and they cost something. We are not saying to take them — we are saying you should know whether you have them, and it is the fifth point to look at during section 2’s quarter of an hour.
And one remark connecting this page to the rest of the pillar: the reasoning is exactly the equipment-purchase article’s, seen from the other end. An estate bought all at once ages all at once, and crosses together into the zone where its insured value becomes small.
What insurance does not cover, and it has to be said
This section is what makes the rest of the page usable, and it runs against what people expect from an article about insurance.
Most of what this pillar recommends is not insurable. A shared password, an access never revoked, a forgotten firewall rule, a backup never restored: none of those lapses is covered by a policy, and none of them is a ground for exclusion either — they are simply beside the point.
Transfer fraud — the message asking for changed bank details, described in the security article — is a case apart and has to be named because it is the commonest loss of all. It falls under specific cover that most SME policies do not include, and the question has to be asked explicitly rather than assumed.
The honest consequence is this: do not expect insurance to replace a habit. It replaces an object, imperfectly and after a delay, and it never replaces a piece of data or a customer relationship.
It is also why we will never say that installing something "will lower your premium". On the SME policies we see, the effect is marginal or nil, and selling a camera on that argument is a promise that binds only the person listening.
The file, and the two months that follow
A claim is not settled in a week, and the period that follows is badly handled because the urgency has passed.
What happens is a series of exchanges: a loss adjuster may be appointed, further documents are requested, a valuation is proposed. Each of those exchanges has a date, and that is the only thing to keep.
A five-line notebook suffices and it is the same act as everywhere else in this pillar: the date, with whom, what was asked for, what was sent. That notebook is what lets you say "the document was sent to you on the 14th" rather than "I think we sent it".
Keep a copy of everything you hand over, including footage. The cameras article says so for a different reason; here the reason is that a file can be reopened, an adjuster can change, and what you sent in March will be asked for again in May.
And if the valuation offered seems low, the challenge is made in writing with documents rather than on the phone with arguments. The documents are section 4’s inventory and the invoices it references — this is the moment the hour invested before the loss pays itself back.
The half day that prepares all of this
Everything above is prepared in half a day, once, and reread for an hour a year. Here is the list, in order.
One hour: section 4’s inventory, with serial numbers read off the backs of the machines, filed somewhere other than the office.
A quarter of an hour: the contract’s five points — equipment cover and its ceiling, deductible, declaration window, protection conditions, and new-for-old or depreciation.
Ten minutes: the call to the agent with section 6’s question, the one comparing what is written with what exists.
And one page posted next to the contract: the agent’s number, the policy number, the declaration window in days, and section 3’s four steps in order. It is the same page as the one by the operator’s box and the one for stopping a SIM, and it is useful for the same reason — nobody goes looking for a policy number in the hours after a break-in.
What is worth more than a settlement
It has to close on what this page cannot do, otherwise it would suggest that a well-kept file replaces an organisation.
A settlement arrives afterwards. It reimburses objects, at a reduced value, over a period counted in weeks. During those weeks your business needs to work, and nothing in the contract helps you with that.
What does help is elsewhere and is already written in this pillar: a backup that has been restored once, a second line that has been tried, a list of four things that must continue, a loan machine. Those four decide whether a loss costs three days or three weeks.
So the right way to read this page is: insurance covers replacement, your organisation covers continuity, and the two are neither interchangeable nor in competition. A well-insured, badly organised business suffers exactly the same stoppage as an uninsured one.
It is also why this page belongs to the security family rather than to an administrative heading. The insurer is the only third party who will look at your arrangements, and what they will look at is what you did long before they arrived.
What we do, and what we refuse to do
What we refuse first: selling equipment on the promise of a lower premium. On the SME policies we see the effect is marginal or nil, and it is the most effective sales argument in this market.
We also refuse to advise on the cover itself. We are neither brokers nor lawyers; section 2 asks you to read your contract and section 6 to put a question to your agent — we replace neither, and an IT provider interpreting an exclusion clause does you a very poor service.
And we refuse to produce a certificate describing a system we did not install and verify ourselves. It is a common request after a loss and an understandable one; answering it would mean certifying a state of affairs we do not know.
What we do fits in section 10’s half day: the inventory with serial numbers read machine by machine, filed away from the office; the page posted beside the contract; and a written, dated and signed list of what is actually in place, which you can show your agent.
And one thing to do this week without us, in a quarter of an hour: take out your contract and find the deductible. That figure alone will tell you whether the losses you fear are worth declaring, and it often reorders the priorities of this entire pillar.
Frequently asked questions
What should we do in the first hours after a theft?
In order: the police complaint, which cannot be recovered later; the written declaration to the insurer in the form the contract provides for, a phone call generally not being enough; then twenty photographs before putting the premises back in order. That last point is the one everybody inverts, because the first reaction to a ransacked room is to tidy it.
Why is a settlement often below the loss?
Two reasons, and the first has nothing to do with the insurer: an insurer indemnifies what can be identified and valued, and "four laptops" describes nothing. It needs a description, a serial number, a date and an invoice. The second is depreciation: a four-year-old machine is not reimbursed at the price of a new one, absent a new-for-old clause.
What inventory should we keep?
Six columns and an hour’s work: description, serial number, purchase date, price, location, invoice reference. It half exists at your accountant’s and what it lacks is the serial numbers, read once off the backs of the machines. File it **somewhere other** than the office: a theft often takes the machines and the computer that held the list.
Is lost data compensated?
What is indemnifiable is the cost of reconstitution — hours of re-entry, recovery from a damaged medium — and not what the data is worth to you. The consequence is direct: a business whose backup has been restored once loses a few hours’ work, and one whose backup never has has a loss nothing can quantify and therefore nothing compensates.
Does installing cameras lower the premium?
On the SME policies we see, the effect is marginal or nil, and it is the most effective sales argument in this market. What matters more is that the system matches the conditions written into your contract: those are checked after the loss, and the common case is not fraud but drift — a contract signed when the business was in different premises.
Where do we start if we do only one thing?
Take out the contract and find the deductible, a quarter of an hour. That figure tells you whether the losses you fear are worth declaring, and it often reorders the priorities of this whole pillar. Then the inventory with serial numbers, which serves three other purposes and takes an hour.
Where we come in
Fifteen minutes with the policy produces one number — the excess — and it reorders what is worth protecting at all.
- We record serial numbers machine by machine, not by batch.
- We prepare the page to display and the dated list your insurer will ask for.
- We describe only what we installed and verified ourselves.
Do not ask us whether a given cover applies: we are not brokers, and an approximate answer would be paid for at the claim.
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