The third, largest placement of parametric cloud outage catastrophe bond "Cumulus Re" attracted a greater number of investors than its predecessors to provide sponsor Hannover Re with $35 million worth of retrocessional protection for 2026-7.
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The parametric bond provides 12 months of protection against the accumulation of losses arising from a cloud-outage event. It is triggered by a sustained downtime that affects one of the three largest public cloud service providers, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform, in specified major US and EU provider regions. These have been categorized into three tiers based on their potential exposure, with a different payout formula for each tier.
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Reflecting strong investor demand, the bond was upsized to $35 million from $20 million for the previous issue. Cumulus Re was not triggered during its first two years. To act as structuring agent for the bond, Parametrix draws on its unparalleled downtime dataset, which includes thousands of actual outage events and billions of graded-availability data points. Its proprietary, continuous cloud availability monitoring system supports its role as calculation agent for the bond issue.
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“Multiple significant cloud outages occurred during the second half of 2025. Each of the big three providers had at least one in an important cloud region, which has underlined the potential for a catastrophic cloud outage,” said Sharon Haran, Managing Director of Parametrix Analytics. “It’s remote, but it’s possible. We are delighted to see the expanded support from investors to cover the tail risk, which makes shorter outage risks insurable down the line.”
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Dirk Heuer, Head of Group Protection at Hannover Re, said: “We are proud to collaborate on solutions addressing these rapidly developing risk types. Now in the third year since the first Cumulus Re bond was brought to market, we are confident that the risk transfer to capital markets will continue to attract additional capacity to this sector.”

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About Hannover Re

‍Hannover Re is one of the world’s leading reinsurers. It transacts all lines of property & casualty and life & health reinsurance and is present worldwide with more with around 4,000 employees. German property & casualty business of the Hannover Re Group is written by the subsidiary E+S Rück. Established in 1966, Hannover Re is recognised as a reliable partner for innovative risk solutions, exceptional customer intimacy and financial soundness. The rating agencies most relevant to the insurance industry have awarded both Hannover Re and E+S Rück outstanding financial strength ratings: Standard & Poor's AA- “Very Strong” and A.M. Best A+ “Superior”. hannover-re.com