By Doug Green
“What stands out in this research is not a lack of intent, but a gap between ambition and execution,” said Roary Stasko, CEO of Telstra International.
A new Economist Impact study supported by Telstra International finds that organizations in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany are materially underprepared for large-scale digital disruption. In this Technology Reseller News podcast, Roary Stasko, CEO of Telstra International, joined us to discuss what that means for enterprises, service providers and the wider technology community.
The study’s central finding is clear: the biggest weakness is not simply outdated technology. The deeper issue is that many organizations do not yet have the governance, coordination, visibility and partner readiness needed to respond when digital disruption spreads across suppliers, infrastructure and external dependencies.
Stasko described Telstra International as the global arm of Telstra, with more than 75 years of experience in international connectivity and subsea infrastructure. The company operates more than 400,000 kilometers of subsea cable and plays a major role in connecting the U.S. to Asia, Asia to the U.S., and Australia across the wider global network.
That global infrastructure role gives Telstra International a front-row view of digital resilience as a business issue, not just a technical one. The Economist Impact research found that only 25% of organizations across the surveyed markets say their responses to digital disruption go according to plan. The study also found that only 21% have a dedicated team responsible for delivering digital resilience initiatives.
For technology resellers, MSPs, CSPs and enterprise technology leaders, the message is important. Resilience can no longer be treated as a periodic IT exercise or a narrow cybersecurity project. It needs to become a board-level business capability that is tested across the full ecosystem, including partners, suppliers, cloud platforms, communications networks and critical infrastructure.
The research also highlights a major gap between internal confidence and external readiness. Organizations may feel relatively confident about their own cybersecurity plans or regulatory frameworks, but confidence drops sharply when disruption involves external dependencies. That is where weak information sharing, limited joint testing and unclear partner governance can turn a disruption into a larger operational failure.
Legacy infrastructure remains another challenge. While many organizations have modernized parts of their technology environment, older systems still support large portions of enterprise operations. That makes it harder to design resilience into systems from the beginning and harder to recover quickly when disruptions occur.
The rise of AI adds another layer of urgency. As AI workloads increase demand on networks, data centers, energy systems and water resources, resilience planning must account for more than cyber threats. Physical infrastructure, climate-related risk, power availability and communications continuity are now part of the same conversation.
The podcast explores why digital resilience must move from intention to execution. The organizations that perform best will be those that assign clear ownership, test across their ecosystem, modernize infrastructure, and build resilience into the way they operate every day.
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