Resilience is not a department

Resilience must be built into products from the start, ensuring they withstand failures like outages or network loss, rather than being treated as an afterthought.

Published on 17 May 2025

Written by Martin Hinshelwood

1 minute read

https://nkdagility.com/resources/PWgzGL20QAo

Resilience is not a department. It’s not a project. It’s not an afterthought.

It is a product capability.

If your product can’t survive failure—network loss, regional outage, DNS breakage—it is not a product. It is a liability with a pretty UI.

Too many teams optimise for performance, cost, or velocity—until something goes wrong. Then they realise they optimised for fragility. Spain’s blackout. Oracle’s healthcare cloud crash. Every one of these was built to succeed in PowerPoint, not in the real world.

If your disaster recovery plan has never been tested under load, with real users and real failover, then you don’t have a plan. You have a spreadsheet fantasy.

The next outage won’t care how good your uptime graph looked last quarter.

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