TL;DR: Cyber insurers are no longer pricing based on the presence of controls. They are pricing based on expected loss severity and recovery speed. Organisations with 24×7 managed detection and response consistently generate lower-severity claims and faster recovery. Insurers are already pricing this through risk banding. By 2026, MXDR will move from optional to expected.
“Cyber insurers are no longer impressed by a shopping list of security tools. They are underwriting against downtime, recovery friction and claim severity. If you cannot evidence 24×7 detection and disciplined containment with timestamps, you are asking them to price uncertainty.”
- Philip Ridley, Cyber Risk Management Director, CyberOne
Underwriting Has Already Shifted What It Rewards
Cyber insurance underwriting has moved away from tick-box compliance and towards operational proof - the kind you can evidence with logs, timestamps, playbooks and post-incident records.
That change is not happening in a vacuum. UK data shows why insurers are pressing harder
- The mean average cost of the single most disruptive breach for businesses that had an outcome was £8,260 (medium/large £12,560). [Source: Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025 - DSIT/Home Office, 2025]
- UK insurers reported £197m paid in cyber claims in 2024, up 230% year on year, with malware and ransomware making up 51% of claims. [Source: ABI, 2025]
Broker commentary is also converging on “effectiveness over presence”:
- Marsh highlights that controls need to be properly managed and used, not just deployed, linking this to better outcomes and lower loss. [Source: Risk Intelligence Centre Report - Marsh]
- Aon describes underwriting moving away from simplistic “control X = result Y” assumptions, with more attention on how controls perform in practice and how organisations present maturity and insurability. [Raising a Red Flag: Cyber Risk Controls and Insurability - Aon ]
What insurers are really buying down is loss severity. The faster you detect, triage and contain, the less downtime, fewer endpoints impacted and lower recovery cost.
What Renewal Questionnaires Are Now Asking For
1.Evidence that MFA is enforced, not merely configured
What they want to see: Conditional access policies, enforcement for admins and remote access, exclusions documented and justified, coverage reports showing adoption across users and privileged accounts.
Why it matters: Credential-led intrusion is still a common starting point for larger losses. Enforced MFA reduces successful account takeover and limits lateral movement.
2. Detections with timestamps from endpoint, identity and email systems
What they want to see: Examples of real alerts with timestamps (detect → triage → escalate), alert fidelity (noise vs true positives), 24×7 coverage and handover model, evidence that logs are retained and searchable.
Why it matters: Underwriting is increasingly about time-to-detect and time-to-contain, because those are leading indicators of business interruption severity.
3. Documented response actions taken during incidents
What they want to see: Incident response runbooks, who does what, decision thresholds for containment, evidence of tabletop exercises, after-action reviews, proof that playbooks are used, not shelfware.
Why it matters: a strong plan that is not rehearsed rarely survives first contact. Insurers want confidence you can act fast under pressure.
4. Backup testing and restoration evidence
What they want to see: Test frequency, restore success rate, recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO), immutable or offline backups, separation from domain compromise risk.
Why it matters: For ransomware-driven business interruption, restoration speed is a direct driver of claim size.
Telemetry Alone Does Not Improve Pricing
SIEM and XDR telemetry is now the entry price. What underwriters care about is whether you can turn signals into action, consistently, at any hour.
That focus is getting sharper because UK loss experience remains material:
- UK insurers paid £197m in cyber claims in 2024, up 230% year on year, with malware and ransomware 51% of claims. [Source: ABI, 2025]
- The UK Cyber Monitoring Centre estimated the financial impact of major UK retail ransomware disruption at £270m to £440m (category 2 systemic event). [Source: Cyber Monitoring Centre, 2025]
- The National Cyber Security Centre continues to describe ransomware as a highly disruptive, business-impacting threat, particularly for critical sectors. [Source: NCSC Annual Review 2025, 2025]
So the conversation at renewal is less “what tools did you buy?” and more “how quickly can you detect, decide and contain before disruption scales?”.
What Claims Handlers and Underwriters Look for In Practice
Alert Lifecycles with Timestamps
What good looks like: A clear, auditable chain from alert generated → triaged → escalated → contained → closed, with timestamps captured at each step. This proves you can provide evidence time-to-detect and time-to-respond in practice, not just state that you have monitoring in place.
What hurts pricing: Any sign of drift or delay, such as alerts sitting unowned, investigations starting hours (or days) after the first signal, or repeated detections with no containment action logged.
Mandatory Triage and Escalation Rules
What good looks like: A documented triage model that defines severity criteria, who gets notified and when, target response times by severity and clear “stop and escalate” thresholds. This proves decision-making is standardised and repeatable, so serious alerts are handled quickly even out of hours and regardless of who is on shift.
What hurts pricing: Ad hoc escalation, unclear on-call arrangements, inconsistent severity ratings, or a reliance on a single individual to interpret risk and decide next steps.
Documented Containment Actions
What good looks like: Evidence you can execute containment quickly and safely through repeatable actions such as disabling compromised accounts, forcing sign-out, isolating endpoints, blocking malicious email senders, revoking session tokens and tightening conditional access policies. This proves you can limit spread and reduce business interruption rather than simply observing an incident develop. Why it matters to insurers is that Lloyd’s guidance on handling ransomware claims stresses early coordination and securing the environment, which is exactly what effective containment delivers.
Evidence of Tuning and Reduction in Alert Noise Over Time
What good looks like: A defensible tuning process backed by documented use cases, tuning logs, suppression rules with approvals, regular detection reviews and proof that high-volume false positives are being eliminated. This proves analysts can focus on high-confidence threats, which improves response speed and reduces missed escalation due to alert fatigue.
What hurts pricing: A noisy alert environment with low action rates, inconsistent triage outcomes and no evidence that the monitoring programme is getting more efficient over time.
Claims Data Shows an Order-of-Magnitude Gap
Claims data keeps pointing to the same practical truth: the longer an incident runs, the more it costs. In the UK, insurers are paying out materially more than they were just a year ago, which is why underwriters are pushing harder for proof that organisations can contain incidents quickly. In 2024, insurers paid £197 million in cyber claims for UK businesses, a 230% year on year increase, with malware and ransomware accounting for 51% of claims. [Source: ABI, 2025]
To complement UK market data, insurers and reinsurers frequently reference broader claims studies. The NetDiligence Cyber Claims Study 2025 is widely used across the insurance market because it is based on 10,402 real cyber insurance claims from incidents occurring 2020 to 2024. [Source: Cyber Claims Study 2025 Report - NetDiligence].The point you can safely make, without overstating it, is that claims costs escalate significantly when disruption drags on, especially where ransomware leads to prolonged business interruption.
Plain-English version: insurers do not just care that you own security tools. They care how quickly you can stop an incident becoming prolonged downtime and a bigger claim.
How Underwriters Translate Operations into Pricing
Insurers do not publish a formula for premiums, but underwriting decisions follow a consistent logic. Underwriters effectively group organisations into internal “risk tiers” based on the likelihood and expected severity of a loss. You will typically see scenarioa like: basic controls with no continuous monitoring, tools deployed but response is business hours or ad hoc, then 24×7 monitoring with defined triage and escalation, and finally mature operations with evidence of testing, tuning and rapid containment.
Moving up or down these tiers tends to influence the levers insurers can actually pull at renewal: base premium assumptions, ransomware and business interruption sub-limits, deductibles or coinsurance, and how restrictive endorsements and conditions become.
This is also why questionnaires are getting more operational. Lloyd’s guidance for handling ransomware claims focuses heavily on early, structured incident handling and securing the environment, which is exactly the kind of evidence underwriters want to see behind your answers. [Source: Guidance for handling a ransomware claim incident - Lloyd’s].
Plain-English version: the insurer is pricing expected loss severity. Strong, provable operations make that expected severity look lower.
Why 2026 Is Not Speculation
The expectation that “continuous detection plus response discipline” becomes the norm is driven by economics, not a technology fad. UK attack prevalence remains high. The UK Government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025 reports 43% of businesses experienced a breach or attack in the last 12 months, rising to 67% of medium and 74% of large businesses. [Source: Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025 - UK Government].
Pair that with the UK claims picture (ABI) and it is clear why insurers are asking harder questions about how quickly you detect and contain incidents. [ABI, 2025]. Once the market starts asking operational questions consistently, the direction of travel is predictable: evidence-led buyers get better renewal conversations, while “tools-only” answers increasingly result in tighter terms.
Plain-English version: underwriting is following the money. If claims stay expensive, insurers keep pushing towards the factors that reduce downtime and disruption.
“By 2026, continuous managed detection and response will not be a differentiator at renewal, it will be expected. The organisations that can prove rapid detection and structured containment will sit in a different risk tier. Those that cannot will face tighter terms, higher deductibles and harder conversations."
-Philip Ridley, Cyber Risk Management Director, CyberOne
Bottom Line
Insurers are already pricing for how you operate, not what you have purchased. UK claims payouts and breach prevalence help explain why. Continuous monitoring paired with disciplined response reduces the chance that an incident turns into a long disruption and a high-severity claim.