The New Reality in Cyberinsurance: CISOs Are Buying Confidence, Not Just Coverage

For years, cyberinsurance served as a safety net for CISOs — the one lever they could pull when prevention felt impossible. Rising premiums and restrictive underwriting were the price of uncertainty.

But that dynamic is changing.

According to the CISO Perspectives for 2026 report, only 40% of CISOs say they are constantly evaluating solutions to improve their insurance premiums—a sharp decline from 68% last year. Security leaders are gaining confidence in their ability to manage risk, and according to the data, they have a greater understanding about what cyberinsurance does and does not do.

Reactive coverage to proactive control

A few years ago, the cyberinsurance market was chaotic. Breach frequency skyrocketed, underwriting tightened, and premiums surged. CISOs spent much of their time mapping controls to insurer questionnaires instead of focusing on security itself. Now, that energy is shifting.

As zero trust frameworks mature and cloud-native security simplifies control, insurance is becoming a validation tool—not a crutch.

CISOs are still maintaining coverage, but they’re less reliant on it as a buffer against the unknown. They’re more focused on measurable resilience: posture visibility, unified access control, and the ability to prove compliance and containment in real time.

This change is evident in the data: across multiple risk categories, from supply-chain to insider to phishing, CISOs report significantly greater clarity about what’s covered under their policies and where the gaps remain.

That clarity isn’t just helping them negotiate better terms. It’s helping them design better security strategy.

Why premiums are stabilizing—and confidence is rising

Insurers are recalibrating, but so are security teams.

As organizations adopt cloud-native, zero trust architectures, the attack surface shrinks and the evidence trail expands. NAC, ZTNA, and identity-aware controls create the kind of audit-ready visibility that insurers value—and that CISOs can point to when proving due diligence.

The result: better risk scoring, fewer exclusions, and more rational premiums.

However, rising confidence doesn’t mean financial pressure is gone.
Even as coverage clarity improves, cyberinsurance premiums are projected to continue climbing over the next few years, driven by the cost and frequency of ransomware, data extortion, and third-party breaches. The big unknown here is how securing AI risks will play out over time, both for security teams and insurers.

The difference now is that CISOs are meeting those challenges from a position of control. They understand the levers that influence premiums, from endpoint visibility and zero trust adoption to verified incident response plans.

Where coverage once felt confusing and arbitrary, it’s now a function of maturity and measurable resilience. More importantly, the role of cyberinsurance is changing. Instead of relying on policies to absorb uncertainty, CISOs are, and should be, focusing on reducing that uncertainty at its source—through measurable control and continuous validation.

The emerging model: measurable resilience

The days of “buy a policy and hope for the best” are fading. The next generation of cyberinsurance buyers are more sophisticated—they’re demonstrating readiness through data.

Unified access control, role-based authentication, and automated policy enforcement now feed directly into risk models insurers use to price coverage. The more visibility you have, the lower your exposure—and the smaller the payout risk for the insurer. It is no secret that many security teams turn to NAC to meet insurer requirements.

This is creating a healthier market and, for CISOs, a stronger position. The better your telemetry, the less you have to negotiate from fear.

Bottom line

The new reality for cyberinsurance is this: it is moving from a confusing, cautionary necessity to a benchmark of confidence.

The CISOs who treat insurance as one layer of a resilience strategy, rather than the strategy itself, are rewriting the rules of cyber risk management.

They understand what’s covered. They trust their controls. And they’re proving, through visibility and automation, that preparedness is the best policy of all.