ACE European Group (ACE) has joined forces with information security specialist QCC to offer crisis management consultancy as part of its IT network risk solution - ACE Dataguard.

The cover provides greater support for business in managing reputational issues in the event of an incident which puts their corporate information and networked assets at risk.

The move is a response to a survey of 269 senior European risk managers, conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and sponsored by ACE, Cisco Systems, Deutsche Bank, IBM and KPMG. Thirty six per cent of respondents were from companies in the financial services sector, 90% of whom cited protecting the corporate reputation of their business as their key priority.

Survey respondents identified security breaches, including sensitive data leaks and hacking of customer data as one of the major threats to corporate reputation. 84% of those questioned felt that threats to their corporate reputation had increased over the last five years. As many as 50% of those surveyed reported that their organisation had already suffered financial losses as a result of damage to their corporate reputation.