Five priorities reshaping networking and connectivity in the UK insurance sector

For UK insurers, networking and connectivity are no longer just ‘back office’ infrastructure decisions. They now influence regulatory resilience, customer experience and operational efficiency.

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

1. Compliance needs visibility

Regulations such as DORA and UK Operational Resilience requirements place a renewed focus on the infrastructure that underpins financial services. Increasingly, insurers must demonstrate resilience, not just claim it.

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 and network digital twin simulations that produce auditable proof.

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

2. Customer experience is a network outcome

Customers and brokers now benchmark insurers against digital experience. A slow claims portal, delayed policy screens or an unreliable call centre quickly affect customer confidence.

Networks rarely fail completely, but inconsistent performance can still damage the experience.

Where networking contributes:

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

Why it matters: Consistent performance helps prevent the frustration 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 stall.

Modern networking strategies focus on making data movement predictable.

Examples include:

• Modernising WAN architectures using SD WAN and private connectivity.
• Direct connections to cloud providers to avoid 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 programmes to scale without disruption.

4. Reduce network complexity

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 that accelerates troubleshooting.
• Human in the loop Agentic AI autonomously optimises networks and corrects repeating faults.

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

5. Support a hybrid 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.
• 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?

Continue the conversation

At Softcat, we work with insurers to turn networking strategy into practical outcomes across 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.