The Forgotten Risk - Outages During Key Moments

Every estate has a plan for the lights going out. Generators are tested, batteries checked, procedures rehearsed. But when the internet fails, too often the response is improvisation. And in modern estates, where so much of daily life depends on connectivity, improvisation is not enough.

The truth is that connectivity is now a critical utility. It underpins business activity, security oversight, staff coordination, and even guest experience. When the line drops during a board call, when cameras fall offline, or when cloud systems grind to a halt, it isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s visible downtime, and downtime is the one thing principals tend not to tolerate well.

In one client we worked with, the principal was convinced they had redundancy. A second line had been installed, but had never been configured to take over automatically in the event of the primary line failing. Calls still collapsed at crucial moments. The investment was there, but the system had never been tested. It’s a story we see often, resilience assumed, rather than proven.

What makes this such a blind spot is that estates treat connectivity differently to other essentials. Power and water are managed with rigour. Continuity is expected, interruptions planned for. Connectivity, however, is often left to “good enough.” Yet the impact of a digital outage can be just as disruptive, halting productivity, undermining security, and eroding confidence.

The solution is not more technology, but more disciplined system design. Continuity must be thought of in the same way principals think about their companies, as an uptime guarantee. Estates should move away from asking “what if the internet goes down?” and instead ask “what’s our continuity percentage?” When framed as system performance, rather than emergency response, continuity becomes something measurable, improvable, and reassuring.

At its simplest, this means more than having a second line. It means designing connectivity with layers of resilience, automatic failover that switches invisibly, mobile backup to absorb the unexpected, and monitoring that tells staff about an issue before the principal ever notices. Just as importantly, these systems must be tested, rehearsed, and optimised, regularly, because resilience that isn’t proven is little more than KLM a theory.

The difference this makes is striking. That same residence, once plagued by failed calls, now operates without interruption. Board meetings run smoothly. Security remains consistent. Guests never ask for Wi-Fi codes twice. The principal doesn’t think about connectivity anymore, which is exactly the point. Continuity, once fragile, is now invisible.

Connectivity is no longer an add, on to estate life. It is an essential system, and like every system, its true measure is performance. Estates that optimise for uptime, rather than hoping for the best, not only avoid disruption but also deliver the quiet assurance principals expect. In the end, continuity isn’t about preventing outages; it’s about ensuring they no longer matter.