Challenges
Zurich US is a leading provider of commercial insurance and risk management services, processing thousands of underwriting submissions every year. To maintain its competitive edge and streamline data-heavy operations, Zurich US has embedded agentic AI directly across its core workflows, including underwriting risk assessment, claims fraud detection, software engineering, and customer and broker interactions.
To provide the resilient foundation necessary for this, Zurich also modernized its infrastructure. The organization migrated 160 applications from legacy data centers into a multi-cloud ecosystem over an 18-month period.
To support continuous business operations, Zurich US needed to shift from simple threat prevention to rapid, granular, and trusted data restoration. Zurich's expanding use of agentic AI, combined with a major cloud migration, introduced new challenges:
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Growing infrastructure complexity
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Lack of modular disaster recovery
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Expanding attack vectors from agentic AI
Outcomes
Partnering with Rubrik helped Zurich US achieve:
Accelerated Detection and Recovery:
Security teams can identify issues immediately and restore compromised environments rapidly using trusted, pre-validated recovery points.
Increased Operational Efficiency:
By automating administrative work, the underwriting team can spend more time on evaluating & identifying the right risks, writing profitable business, and strengthening customer relationships.
AI-Ready Resilience:
Established clean data backups and pre-validated recovery points so teams can scale agentic AI applications with complete governance and safety.
Building Modular Reversibility
As Zurich moved 160 applications into a multi-cloud environment, the team looked to strengthen its resilience alongside the migration. “We wanted to further strengthen our resilience,” says Adam Page, CISO, Zurich. “That's when we put in Rubrik.”
Zurich US can now take a more modular approach to recovery across its infrastructure, which still includes some on-premises storage alongside its multi-cloud ecosystem. Disaster recovery used to be a largely all-or-nothing approach, with Rubrik, Zurich can recover specific systems or application environments independently. If the claims system is compromised, the company can restore it without affecting applications elsewhere in the business.
Rubrik also gave Zurich a centralized view of its backups, including their health and any anomalies, while helping the company rigorously test its resilience capabilities. As the threat landscape evolves, Zurich and Rubrik have developed a close working relationship. “They bring their thoughts and strategy to us, and we put an operational lens on it,” says Page.
Embedding AI on a Foundation of Resilience
Zurich is now better positioned for resilience by partnering with Rubrik. Their team can quickly detect a problem and begin recovery with confidence,without disrupting unrelated business operations. Immutable, pre-validated recovery points have eliminated the time previously spent determining where to roll systems back to. Rubrik’s AI-driven anomaly detection flags suspicious behavior in real time when indicators of compromise are triggered.
Rubrik’s built-in AI assistant, Ruby, continues learning over time, helping Zurich identify application-specific recovery patterns and accelerate restoration. The broader impact goes beyond operational efficiency. By reducing administrative work, AI is giving underwriters more time to focus on customers and higher-value activities. That resilience foundation is what allows Zurich to treat AI as embedded rather than bolted on. “We don't view AI as a standalone initiative,” says Madhu Ramamurthy, CIO of Zurich US. “We see it as a capability embedded within our business processes to help our teams work more effectively and deliver better outcomes.”
What's Next
Zurich US is at the beginning of its agentic AI journey. The company plans a careful, phased rollout, prioritizing governance alongside innovation. As adoption grows, Zurich intends to use AI for predictive modeling, real-time risk assessment, and creating more personalized customer experiences.
Related Article
Curious how Zurich US is putting resilience to work? Read HERE — Economist Impact's feature on how Zurich US scales AI while strengthening cyber resilience with Rubrik.