One day this winter, upon arriving home from the airport, I found my 100-pound American Bulldog, Carlos, on top of a table in the backyard staring at the ground. Carlos had never jumped onto the top of the table before, but she was having difficulty navigating around the yard because of the 22 inches of snow that Mother Nature had dumped in my area last week. I guess it changed her perception of her world, so that she felt like the ground wasn't as far away from the tabletop when it was covered in snow.

Just as the snow was an unknown for Carlos, many unknowns exist and continue to develop in the insurance world. Years ago, a “tech” was someone who worked in an operating room and cyber risk insurance was something only the very geekiest of geeks imagined. But now, here we are, in the second decade of the new millennium, facing new and different risks, and many ways in which insurance policies can apply to those “tech” and “cyber” risks.

In the past, an entity, depending on what line of business they were in, would typically purchase four basic types of insurance policies: general liability, professional liability, auto policy, and workers' compensation. The policies rarely, if ever, interacted with each other because each covered a relatively distinct and separate risk.