Business Continuity Is Not a Circuit. It’s an Operating Model.

Over the past year, I have had dozens of conversations with COOs, CFOs, and IT leaders across Canada. Most of them start the same way, “we need redundancy. We are adding a backup circuit. We are putting LEO in as failover.” And redundancy absolutely matters.

But here is what I have learned. Redundancy alone does not prevent disruption, because most outages are not pure circuit failures. They are accountability failures.

When Something Breaks, Who Owns It?

When a primary link drops, traffic might reroute. That is the technical part. But what happens next? Who confirms applications recovered? Who coordinates between multiple carriers? Who communicates to operations? Who validates that the business is truly back to normal?

In too many environments, resilience lives in a network diagram but not in an operating model. That is where disruption becomes visible to the business.

The Market Is Optimizing for the Wrong Metric

Large incumbents are optimizing for scale. Satellite providers are optimizing for reach. But most Canadian organizations I speak with are not asking for the widest footprint or the lowest cost per Mbps.

They are asking for predictability.

Retailers cannot afford POS downtime. Manufacturers cannot afford production pauses. Logistics operators cannot afford dispatch visibility gaps.

In those moments, no one cares how many circuits exist. They care who owns the outcome.

Continuity Is a Leadership Decision

Business continuity is not a bandwidth upgrade, it is a leadership choice about risk tolerance.

It requires engineered diversity, proactive monitoring, coordinated escalation, and executive visibility. More importantly, it requires a single accountable partner.

Not multiple carriers. Not finger pointing between vendors. Not we will open a ticket. One owner. That clarity reduces operational strain. It reduces internal escalation noise. It allows your teams to focus on growth instead of incident management.

And candidly, in today’s environment, reducing operational burden is just as important as reducing downtime.

The Shift I Am Seeing

More executive teams are reframing the question. Not how fast is the connection. But “what disruption can we tolerate?”. That shift changes architecture, procurement, and partner selection.

It moves the conversation from cost per Mbps to risk per site, from theoretical uptime to managed outcomes. For organizations where uptime impacts revenue, production, and customer trust, continuity cannot be an add on. It has to be the operating model.

Because resilience is not what happens when a circuit fails, it’s what happens next and who owns it.

A Conversation Worth Having

At TERAGO, this is exactly how we approach business connectivity.

Not as circuits to be sold, but as continuity to be owned. One bill. One escalation path. One accountable partner across connectivity and managed services.

If your organization is rethinking resilience heading into 2026, I would welcome a conversation about what an accountable operating model could look like for you.

May Daou

Author | Chief Customer Officer