… it cascades through power, connectivity, identity, and trust until an organization is forced to operate in a “No IT” condition — core systems unavailable not for minutes, but for days. In May 2025, Kettering Health reported a system-wide technology outage linked to a cybersecurity incident that cancelled procedures and disrupted access to critical systems, a reminder that severe attacks can convert digital operations into manual work overnight.
When the Iberian Peninsula suffered a total blackout on 28 April 2025, the sudden loss of electricity disrupted telecommunications and essential services across Spain and Portugal, illustrating how quickly even well-engineered infrastructure can make applications, networks, and data centers functionally irrelevant

Add the kinetic dimension: UN monitors documented intensified attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in 2025 — and the risk picture shifts from “outage” to “denial of capability,” compounded by the fact that even global internet platforms can suffer significant service interruptions, as Cloudflare’s 18 November 2025 incident showed.

That is why continuity must include post-zero planning: not just how to survive the moment of “No IT,” but how the business will stabilize, reconcile records, re-establish authority, and restart safely on the day after “No IT.”

When a disaster, deliberate attack, or prolonged unresponsiveness of core systems pushes an organization into a true “No IT” condition, the deciding factor is rarely the elegance of the architecture and almost always the human capacity to re-form the enterprise from the ground up. In that moment the formal machine — tickets, workflows, dashboards, approvals—either cannot be reached or cannot be trusted, and resiliency expresses itself as individuals choosing to act locally, correcting what they can see, documenting what they do, and sharing what they learn until isolated efforts begin to align. Those early alignments become small, organically developing cells that anchor around concrete needs — serving customers, keeping people safe, preserving cash and inventory integrity, maintaining regulatory discipline — and they expand their cooperation until these cells connect.

Then they reconstruct the two things a stricken organization loses first: operational continuity, through manual or degraded-mode execution, and command and control, through a shared picture of reality, a cadence of reporting, and clear authority for prioritization that does not depend on unavailable systems. In practice, it is this bottom-up rebuilding—local action, then structured cooperation, then federated coordination—that restores initial capabilities quickly enough to matter, and only afterward can centralized IT and traditional governance reassert themselves without slowing the recovery that people have already begun.

Climate change is already amplifying extremes in ways that are measurable and persistent, which turns what used to be “rare events” into recurring stresses that can overwhelm preparedness built for the past.

At the same time, as AI systems become more capable and more widely embedded—potentially including more general-purpose models—the speed and opacity of automated decisions can magnify error, misuse, or adversarial manipulation faster than organizations can centrally interpret and contain.

Quantum computing adds a further discontinuity by threatening today’s cryptographic foundations, which is why standards bodies are already urging migration to post-quantum encryption before that risk becomes operational.

In such a world, resiliency is not the promise of uninterrupted control but the practiced ability to endure debilitating shocks and recover decisively, and post-zero planning is the discipline that prepares the enterprise for the day after the break.

At the level of the individual, the design begins with a “come as you are” mindset that assumes imperfect availability, partial tools, and constrained cognition, yet still expects purposeful action guided by clear intent, simple rules, and personal readiness to operate safely and record decisions. At the level of the functional unit, the plan presumes that teams may be isolated from formal coordination, so it equips them to reconnect laterally, reorganize roles, and resume minimum viable outputs without waiting for explicit managerial signals, using shared priorities and lightweight routines that travel even when technology does not.

Above them sits operational GRC—not as paperwork, but as a living reporting rhythm and set of processes that translate on-the-ground realities, adaptations, and early successes into an enterprise picture that leaders can trust and act on. When these three levels are designed to reinforce one another, resilience stops being a centralized promise and becomes a practiced continuum: individuals act, units cohere, and governance learns fast enough to restore command and control without suffocating the recovery it is meant to steer.