At our latest Club Telehouse event, we brought together IT leaders, infrastructure specialists, and technology decision-makers at South Place Hotel in London for an afternoon focused on what resilience really looks like in practice.

At the centre of the event was a panel discussion hosted by Mark Pestridge, Executive Vice President & General Manager at Telehouse Europe. He was joined by:

  • Andrew Bailey, Business Development Manager – Hosting & Connectivity, London Stock Exchange Group
  • Matt Williams, Director – Data Centres and MSP at Zayo Europe
  • Magnus Kelly, Technical Director at Proptivity
  • Karl Rose, EMEA Head of Data Centres at Bloomberg

The discussion drew on findings from our latest Paradoxes of Progress research, which polled IT decision-makers at both service provider and enterprise organisations in the UK.

Resilience – what does it mean today?

The panel kicked off with a discussion about what resilience means today – and it quickly became clear that the definition has shifted.

A few years ago, many organisations would have defined it in largely technical terms. That is still part of the picture, though the conversation has moved on. Resilience is now shaped by infrastructure choices, operating models and the ability to respond effectively when conditions become difficult.

This reflects a broader change in how organisations think about continuity — not just as a technical safeguard, but as an operational capability.

“In the digital world, where we rely so much on digital infrastructure to operate, live, work, play, socialise and pay, performance is really important.” – Matt Williams

What’s changed – and why it matters now

As the conversation turned to how the risk landscape has evolved over the past five to six years, a more complex picture emerged.

Cyber security remains high on the agenda, particularly as businesses become more dependent on third parties and more exposed to supply chain risk. At the same time, geopolitical instability is creating new uncertainty, while infrastructure pressures such as constraints on power availability and the demands of AI are becoming harder to ignore.

These pressures are not theoretical. They are already testing how quickly organisations can respond in practice.

Our research highlights a clear disconnect between resilience planning and operational readiness. For example, 53% of IT decision-makers say it would take more than an hour to switch AI inference workloads to an alternative site if a regional incident took their primary UK AI data centre offline. For organisations working in high-pressure environments, where disruption can quickly affect customers and commercial performance, that remains a serious concern.

For compliance to accountability

The discussion also explored how expectations are changing in regulated industries such as financial services.

Rather than simply defining resilience, organisations are now expected to prove it. Regulation is having a greater influence, raising the bar for accountability and increasing scrutiny around supply chains and operational risk.

At the same time, responsibility for resilience has moved higher up the organisation. Downtime is no longer seen as a contained technical issue. It can affect customer trust, day-to-day operations, and wider business performance, which means resilience now receives much greater attention at board level.

“The board is getting involved earlier, but still not quite early enough” – Magnus Kelly

Visibility alone is not enough, however. Effective resilience depends on practical planning, regular testing, and clearly defined ownership across teams.

Why data sovereignty is moving up the agenda

Data sovereignty emerged as a major theme throughout the discussion.

As organisations place workloads across a wider mix of environments, questions around data location and oversight have become more immediate. In some cases, that is being driven by compliance requirements. In others, it comes down to visibility and a stronger need for control in a more fragmented operating climate.

Geopolitical instability has further shapened this focus, increasing sensitivity around where critical services are hosted, and what dependencies sit beneath them.

Our research reflects this shift, with 98% of service provider respondents saying sovereignty is important when choosing cloud or data centre partners.

The gaps undermining resilience in practice

One of the most useful parts of the session came in the discussion around what customers often overlook.

In some cases, the weak points are physical. Shared fibre routes, cloud access paths, and other hidden dependencies can undermine assumptions about redundancy.

In others, the issue is less about infrastructure and more about execution. Resilience depends on people and process as much as technology, which means plans need to work in a live situation, not simply on paper.

“It’s not enough to be resilient independently; you also have to be resilient with your third parties” – Andrew Bailey

That part of the discussion brought the session back to a wider theme running through the afternoon: resilience is easy to describe at a high level, but much harder to deliver consistently when systems, suppliers and teams are all under pressure. The organisations best placed to respond are those that understand their dependencies clearly and test their plans in conditions that reflect real operational strain.

Building resilience that works under pressure

The latest Club Telehouse panel offered a timely discussion of how resilience is changing and why organisations need to think about it more broadly than before.

As digital dependency grows and the risk environment becomes more demanding, resilience will continue to shape decisions around infrastructure, governance and long-term strategy.

For those who would like to explore the findings behind the discussion in more detail, our latest Paradoxes of Progress research provides further insight.