Building Resilience – What Should Boards and Governments Be Doing?

Introduction: Resilience as a Boardroom Imperative

Telecom infrastructure is the digital backbone of modern economies. It underpins banking, logistics, healthcare, energy, and national defence. A breach in telecom infrastructure is no longer just a technical issue—it’s a strategic and geopolitical crisis.

Boards and governments can no longer delegate security solely to technical teams. Resilience must be addressed as a board-level and national security issue, requiring coordinated investment, policy alignment, and long-term risk management.

This blog explores what telecom operators, boards, and governments must do to build resilience in the face of backdoors, nation-state threats, and infrastructure sabotage.

Resilience vs. Security: What’s the Difference?

• Security is about preventing breaches and attacks.

• Resilience is about surviving and recovering when breaches inevitably occur.

A resilient telecom operator:

• Knows its critical dependencies.

• Can isolate compromised components.

• Has redundant communication paths.

• Maintains operational continuity during cyber or physical attacks.

Resilience is not an afterthought—it is the core of future network strategy.

Why Resilience Is Now a National Concern

Telecom networks are no longer just business assets—they are critical national infrastructure (CNI). Disruption of telecoms:

• Freezes banking transactions.

• Halts emergency services.

• Disables logistics and transport.

• Impacts national defence and intelligence coordination.

• Erodes public trust and market stability.

Events like Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian telecoms and unexplained subsea cable damage in the Baltic have proven that telecom networks are now strategic targets. Governments must act in partnership with private operators to ensure these systems can withstand attack.

The 5 Pillars of Telecom Resilience

1. Governance and Board Oversight

Boards must take ownership of resilience strategy:

• Assign a board-level risk committee to oversee telecom security and resilience.

• Demand regular threat briefings and scenario planning.

• Ensure CISO and CTO accountability for both technical and strategic resilience.

• Include resilience as part of enterprise risk management (ERM) frameworks.

2. Supply Chain Control

• Audit vendor and third-party dependencies.

• Diversify suppliers to avoid single points of failure.

• Require vendor transparency, code audits, and secure update protocols.

• Consider domestic or sovereign supply chains for critical equipment.

3. Technical Hardening

• Deploy zero trust architectures across telecom core, RAN, and OSS/BSS.

• Implement network segmentation to prevent lateral movement.

• Maintain air-gapped backups of critical systems and data.

• Use continuous threat intelligence and red teaming.

4. Incident Response and Recovery

• Develop joint operator-government playbooks for telecom sabotage scenarios.

• Establish 24/7 SOC and CERT collaboration.

• Run regular resilience exercises with simulated attacks on key infrastructure.

• Ensure rapid rollback capability for compromised firmware or configurations.

5. National Policy and Regulation

• Enforce compliance frameworks like UK’s Telecoms Security Act or EU’s NIS2 Directive.

• Invest in national telecom testing labs to inspect foreign equipment.

• Encourage public-private partnerships to share threat intelligence.

• Create sovereign communications channels for government and emergency use.

Backdoor and Sabotage Scenarios Boards Must Consider

Boards should model their risk posture against these realistic scenarios:

• Supply Chain Backdoor Activation – A foreign vendor pushes a malicious firmware update that compromises critical RAN nodes.

• Insider Attack – A rogue engineer manipulates OSS provisioning to shut down major customer accounts.

• Nation-State Cyber Strike – Coordinated attack on submarine cable landing stations disrupts international connectivity.

• Cloud Provider Outage – A hyperscaler outage takes down 5G core network functions hosted in public cloud.

• Protocol Exploitation – SS7 or Diameter vulnerabilities enable mass interception of subscriber communications.

For each scenario, boards should ask: Do we have a tested response plan? Can we continue operations within 24 hours?

The Role of Governments

Governments cannot afford to be passive observers of telecom resilience. Their role includes:

• Defining “nationally critical” operators and mandating higher security baselines.

• Funding national cybersecurity initiatives, including red team exercises and threat detection systems.

• Developing sovereign backup systems such as terrestrial navigation (eLORAN) and emergency telecom channels.

• Coordinating international threat intelligence sharing, particularly for cross-border infrastructure like submarine cables.

• Issuing rapid security advisories and maintaining clear communication channels with operators during crises.

Funding Resilience: The Business Case

Telecom boards often see security as a cost centre. Resilience must instead be framed as a business enabler:

• Reduced downtime = preserved revenue.

• Fewer breaches = lower regulatory fines and litigation risk.

• Better trust = stronger B2B partnerships and enterprise sales.

• National alignment = access to government contracts and incentives.

Resilience is not an optional cost—it is a strategic investment in future competitiveness.

Five Questions Every Board Should Ask

1. What is our single point of failure?

2. Which vendors control our most critical network elements?

3. Can we detect and respond to a sabotage attempt within minutes?

4. How do we recover if our cloud core fails or is compromised?

5. Are we aligned with national resilience standards?

If any of these questions cannot be answered confidently, your resilience strategy is incomplete.

Conclusion: Resilience Is a National and Corporate Mandate

The telecom networks of the future will be more open, disaggregated, and software-driven. While this improves innovation and scalability, it also increases complexity—and therefore vulnerability.

Boards must treat telecom resilience not as an operational footnote, but as a strategic pillar of corporate and national security. Governments, in turn, must recognise telecom operators as partners in critical infrastructure defence.

The age of backdoors, state sabotage, and hybrid cyber conflict is already here. Resilience is no longer optional—it’s survival.