Contact us

(831) 722-3541

Contact us

Contact details:

Message:

Your message has been sent successfully. Close this notice.

Commercial Insurance Quote

Coverage Information

Current Coverage Information

Contact details:

Your Quote Form has been sent successfully. Close this notice.

Auto Insurance Quote

Contact details:

Current Coverage Information

Your car:

Your Quote Form has been sent successfully. Close this notice.

Homeowners Insurance Quote

Your house:

Current Coverage Information

Contact details:

Your Quote Form has been sent successfully. Close this notice.

Life Insurance Quote

Life Insurance Details

Current Coverage Information

Contact details:

Your Quote Form has been sent successfully. Close this notice.

Health Insurance Quote

Coverage Information

Current Coverage Information

Contact details:

Your Quote Form has been sent successfully. Close this notice.
8 years ago · by · 0 comments

Lack Of Qualified Workers Raises Safety Concerns

Layoffs during the recession have resulted in a shortage of qualified workers in specialized areas of construction – and the problem will probably get worse as the industry picks up during the recovery. In this environment, some contractors might be tempted to stretch their hiring standards to fill out a project roster, increasing the danger of losses from on-site injuries and defect claims, among other risks.

The past two years have seen a sharp drop in the unemployment rate for former construction workers, but not a corresponding increase in construction industry growth. This means that these workers who have been unemployed are often finding other types of work, becoming full-time students, or have given up looking for a job in the building trades industry.

Because each construction company works in a unique environment and culture, a worker from one firm going to another might not have the required expertise. What’s more, construction is a profession that takes time to learn. Tight profit margins and financial problems can pressure smaller and midsize contractors into cutting corners by hiring inexperienced workers. This increases the risk of on-site accidents and injuries –and leads to poorer quality work that can easily result in costly and annoying defective construction claims (see the article “Construction Managers E&O Insurance: Nobody’s Perfect! ”

In addition as the building industry comes out of the recession, OSHA has become far more aggressive and vigilant in monitoring worker safety.

The bottom line: Avoid the temptation of hiring inexperienced workers as a way to save money, and you’ll keep your risk of on-site accidents and injuries – not to mention your insurance premiums – under control. What’s not to like?

Read more

8 years ago · by · 0 comments

Risk Management: Keep Safety In The Forefront

3

Once employees have gone through safety training, make sure that they use what they’ve learned. When every worker knows and chooses the safe way on a daily basis, you’ll have a workplace with less chance of accidents and injuries.

This four-step approach to job safety will pay dividends:

  1. Team up to solve problems and improve safety. Create employee teams in every department to gather information on potential hazards, analyze problems, develop and test solutions, and implement and monitor results. Being part of a team makes workers feel that they share responsibility, which keeps your safety message top of mind.
  2. Talk up safety every day. Update employees on information that affects their safety. Provide ongoing feedback, praising safe performance, correcting unsafe behavior, and pointing out areas for improvement. Make sure that communication flows both ways. Urge workers to offer suggestions, identify problems, and pose questions – for example, through a safety suggestion system.
  3. Encourage employees to become hazard detectives — and reporters. Make every worker responsible for finding hazards. Create an effective system for reporting problems, and respond promptly to correct hazards that employees identify. This is harder than it sounds because it means that management has to listen when workers discuss safety concerns.
  4. Create a “want-to” safety culture. Encourage your workers to do the safe thing, not because they have to, but because they want to avoid injuries. Remind them of how many safety-related decisions they make every day – and how one bad decision is all it takes to get hurt.

For professional advice on creating or updating your workplace safety program, just give us a call.

Read more

8 years ago · by · 0 comments

Happy Presidents Day

Presidents, South Dakota, LandmarkDid you know:

Jefferson founded the university in 1819 on land that once belonged to eventual President James Monroe. Jefferson is the only president to have ever founded an institution of higher learning.

After finishing his undergraduate degree in 2 years, James Madison stayed at the university for an additional year, making him the Ivy League institution’s first graduate student.

and

Polk, probably aware that many other politicians desired to run for the office, made an explicit campaign promise that if he was elected president, he would leave after 4 years, a promise that he kept.

Read more

8 years ago · by · 0 comments

Mobile security and the ways to mitigate data risk in a BYOD environment

Mobile devices are the mighty double-edged swords of today’s workplace. On the one hand, they provide greater integration of information, on the other, they could be your business’s one-way ticket to a catastrophic security breach. This week we had the amazing opportunity to speak with Anthony Kinney, Microsoft’s Verizon Partner Manager, about mobile security and the ways to mitigate data risk in a BYOD environment.

According to Kinney, the three main security risk areas associated with BYOD are:

  1. Data loss prevention, which has to do with securing the data on a device in the
    case of it being lost or stolen.
  2. Data in transit, which is most often
    protected by encrypting information to ensure that all communications between
    the device and backend infrastructure are secure.
  3. Data leakage, which is
    about keeping a user’s work and personal information separate. In other words,
    “protecting users from themselves.”

We asked Kinney what Microsoft is doing to make sure that moving to a pocket office doesn’t mean introducing security risk. He discussed how our multilayered approach to security makes adopting a BYOD policy far less of a risk, with solutions like Secure boot technology, remote “wipe” capabilities, and automatic cloud storage (among other security solutions).

What makes the greatest difference, however, are the actions a company takes to ensure that their data is secure. The way Kinney sees it, employees jailbreaking and rooting devices is one of the largest risk factors for companies who allow employees to BYOD. What those companies do is implement third-party services to “containerize the data,” so it never actually goes onto the local device.

According to Kinney, Windows Phone solves for this by protecting the data at the data center level before it even gets to the device. This means each document can have specific edit/view/share settings so that when it’s accessed on a mobile device it can’t be ‘saved as’ or forwarded to another cloud service, depending on what the settings permit. This way the phone fully understands the corporate policies on the document, helping IT to provide security—even at the file level.

This level of device integration with your data allows your company to consider a BYOD or CYOD policy without the need for third-party security solutions—which themselves offer another point of potential failure and risk. By working with your existing desktop OS, email, and other systems, the native Windows Phone OS helps mitigate data loss risk for your pocket office by preventing it in the first place.

Read more

Company information

Scurich Insurance Services
Phone: (831) 661-5697
Fax: (831) 661-5741

Physical:
783 Rio Del Mar Blvd., Suite7,
Aptos, Ca 95003-4700

Mailing:
PO Box 1170
Watsonville, CA 95077-1170

Contact details

E-mail address:
[email protected]

(831) 661-5697

Available 8:30am - 5:00pm