Five priorities reshaping networking and connectivity in the UK insurance sector

UK insurance has always been a data driven and relationship driven business. But today, the quality of those relationships with customers, brokers, and partners increasingly depends on how well an insurer’s digital infrastructure performs. Networking and Connectivity is no longer a back office foundation, it has become an enabler of resilience, customer experience and operational efficiency.

From our work across UK insurers, five priorities repeatedly surface, that are reshaping how networking strategies are evolving.

1. Compliance needs network visibility

Regulations such as DORA and UK Operational Resilience and associated requirements place a renewed focus on the infrastructure that underpins financial services. Increasingly, insurers now need evidencable resilience, and that makes the network part of the regulatory conversation.

Many insurers we speak to still have distributed estates, patchy documentation and inconsistent monitoring across branches, datacentres and clouds, an issue that becomes visible only during audits or outages.

Where networking helps:

• Automated asset discovery to maintain accurate inventories of network infrastructure and configurations.
• End to end observability to generate incident timelines, performance baselines and compliance evidence as part of normal operations.
• Resilience validation including automated failover tests and network digital twin simulations that produce auditable proof regulators expect.

Why it matters: Insurers can demonstrate regulatory resilience while eliminating countless hours spent collecting audit evidence across network architectures.

2. Customer experience is a network outcome

Customers and brokers now benchmark insurers against digital experience. A slow claims portal, delayed loading of policy screens for call handlers or an unreliable call centre due to network latency can quickly affect customer confidence. Networks rarely “go down” entirely, but performance inconsistencies are enough to erode trust.

Where networking contributes:

• Application aware routing and strong quality of service policies  prioritise customer facing services and support customer retention and experience during periods of congestion..
• Resilient connectivity with redundant paths and automatic failover to maintain service availability and reachability.
• Real‑time experience monitoring  ensure issues are detected and resolved quickly.

Why it matters: Consistent performance helps prevent the frustration of negative claim interactions that often leads to customer churn.

3. Remove friction from the data path

Analytics, faster claims automation and more effective fraud detection rely on data moving quickly and predictably between branches, data centres cloud services and AI platforms. When connectivity is slow or inconsistent, data-driven initiatives stallModern networking strategies focus on making data movement predictable and reliable.

Examples include:

• Modernising WAN architectures using SD WAN and private WAN backbones combined with the right mix of last-mile connectivity.
• Direct private connections to cloud environments reduces the risks of data traversing unpredictable internet paths.
• Observability for data pipelines enables issue detection to move from reactive to proactive and even predictive.

Why it matters: Data teams gain reliable access to the datasets they need, enabling analytics  and AI initiatives to scale and accelerate without connectivity disruption.

4. Reduce network complexity and improve operational efficiency

Most insurers operate multi-vendor estates with separate tools for LAN, WAN, monitoring, cloud and DC networking. That fragmentation slows delivery, complicates change control and makes troubleshooting dependent on a handful of experts.

In many cases, complexity, not capacity, is the real challenge.

Approaches that improve efficiency include:

• Centralised network management and standardised configuration.
• Unified observability across networks, reduces MTTR (Mean Time To Remediate) and  accelerates troubleshooting.
• Human-in-the-loop Agentic AI autonomously optimises networks and corrects repeating faults.

Why it matters: Simplified AI-enabled network operations gives technical teams time to focus on resilience, innovation and strategic delivery, rather than day-to-day troubleshooting.

5. Support a hybrid insurance workforce

Insurance workforces are now distributed across branches, offices, home and field locations. Weak wireless, inconsistent remote connectivity and fragmented network security controls quickly become productivity blockers.

Modern networking strategies focus on providing secure and reliable access, regardless of location.

Key capabilities include:

• Enterprise grade wireless built for dense and mobile working environments to facilitate strong collaboration.
• Secure access service edge (SASE) architectures that apply consistent security policies across all users and locations.
• Multi-network 4G/5G connectivity for field teams, ensures people productive in unpredictable environments.

Why it matters: Employees stay connected, secure and productive while insurers avoid the hidden risks created by ad hoc workarounds.

Bringing network strategy and insurance sector goals together

The insurers making the most progress are not always those with the biggest budgets, they are the ones aligning networking and connectivity investments to measurable outcomes: 

• Regulatory confidence
• Customer loyalty
• Operational agility
• Data-driven innovation

A useful question for technology leaders is:

Could you demonstrate, tomorrow, that your most important customer journeys remain resilient during a network failure and evidence it?

Continue the conversation

At Softcat, we work with insurers to turn networking strategy into practical outcomes across network resilience, performance and security.

If you’d like to explore what this means for your organisation, contact your Softcat Account Manager or Networking & Security Specialist to continue the conversation.