EDITOR’ S QUESTION

’ ve spent over 13 years helping companies scale digitally – but I’ ve seen how digital convenience can quietly evolve into total dependency. It’ s subtle. One new cloud platform here, a remote-first policy there … and suddenly, everything’ s online, and no one asks: what if it all goes dark?

That’ s exactly what happened during the recent blackout in Spain and Portugal.

It wasn’ t just a power cut – it was a domino collapse of essential digital systems. Telecoms, mobile data, Wi-Fi, payments, cloud access, even emergency services in some cities – all gone in an instant. Some people said they couldn’ t even buy a bottle of water – card machines were down and few places were set up to take cash. Others said it felt like their phone just stopped working. No signal, no news, no explanation – just silence. vanished for the day. And worse – very few had a documented, tested or known plan B. For many, the only backup was hope.

What helped the ones that coped? Low-tech backups and good old-fashioned improvisation. Some used offline stock ledgers and printed supplier contacts. Others switched to manual queue systems or served customers by candlelight. In one hostel, people reportedly lent each other cash in exchange for handwritten IOUs to get through the day. Elsewhere, prescriptions were scribbled out by hand when hospital systems went down. Scrappy, yes – but effective. When the digital goes dark, its often these small, analogue gestures that keep things moving.

If your business is truly digital-first, then digital resilience should be board-level stuff. It’ s not just for IT.

There was no hostile actor, no malware, no ransomware – this wasn’ t a cyberattack – just a blunt failure of infrastructure. But that’ s the point. When everything – your systems, comms, payments – is digital, even a basic disruption can cascade into a full shutdown. It’ s not always the dramatic threats that hit hardest; sometimes it’ s the everyday fragility we overlook.

Businesses couldn’ t trade, teams couldn’ t

TREAT DIGITAL LIKE ELECTRICITY: BRILLIANT, ESSENTIAL AND PRONE TO FAIL AT THE WORST TIME.

communicate and most had no usable fallback. Cloud CRMs? Inaccessible without Internet. VOIP systems? Dead without connectivity. Internal comms tools went quiet too – without power or Internet, even basic team co-ordination became impossible. Even basic things like logging into an online dashboard or checking a delivery status became impossible. In some cases, entire customer service operations just

Some key actions:

Offline access to mission-critical data – contacts, ops docs, passwords.

Redundant communication plans: SMS, satellite devices, even basic call trees.

Cash or manual payment processes: even shortterm outages can disrupt payroll or sales.

Run drills: simulate a no-digital day. You’ ll quickly see the weak points.

And while the Digital Operational Resilience Act( DORA) is making this mandatory in regulated sectors, even outside finance, its core principles of mapping dependencies, testing scenarios and building fallback options – are all smart business. Treat digital like electricity: brilliant, essential and prone to fail at the worst time.

Digital dependency isn’ t the issue. Pretending it’ s invincible is.

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