What Running IT in Lagos Taught Us About Resilience in London

In London, a power cut is a story you tell colleagues the next morning. In Lagos, it is simply part of the operating day. Anyone who has run a business there plans around the grid rather than relying on it, because the alternative is a business that stops working several times a week.

Our parent company, Amber Royal Multi Ltd., has operated in Nigeria since 2009, with IT infrastructure among its service lines. That environment shapes how you think about technology in a way that no amount of theory can. And the longer we work with UK businesses through our branch here, the more convinced we are that the thinking — not the hardware — is what transfers.

Failure as a planning assumption

The fundamental difference is where failure sits in your planning. In much of the UK, infrastructure failure is treated as an exception — something that happens rarely, gets fixed by someone else, and is not really your problem to design for. In Nigeria, failure is an input. You assume the grid will let you down, you assume a connection will drop, and you design so that when it happens — not if — the work continues.

That assumption changes every purchasing decision that follows. Nobody in Lagos buys a single point of failure and hopes. Power arrives in layers: the grid when it is available, generators when it is not, inverters and batteries to bridge the gap in between. Connectivity is bought the same way — and for sites beyond the reach of reliable fibre, satellite links (VSAT) remain a genuine part of the toolkit rather than an exotic option.

None of this is heroic. It is ordinary, budgeted, unremarkable practice in an environment that punishes wishful thinking.

The paradox of reliable infrastructure

Here is the uncomfortable observation from the other side. British infrastructure is excellent — and that very reliability breeds fragility in the systems built on top of it.

We regularly see UK businesses running entirely on a single broadband line with no failover, with critical data protected by a backup that nobody has ever tested restoring, behind a router nobody has looked at since installation. It works, month after month — until the day it does not. And because failure is so rare, there is no muscle memory when it arrives: no procedure, no fallback, no sense of what the business can still do while the problem is fixed.

A business that loses connectivity once every five years, with no plan, can suffer more disruption from that single event than a Lagos office suffers in a year of routine outages it has planned for.

To be clear: we are not suggesting UK offices need diesel generators. The infrastructure here does not warrant it. What transfers is the discipline, and the discipline is cheap.

Four habits that transfer

1. Make redundancy cross failure domains. Two of something is not redundancy if both fail for the same reason. A second internet connection that runs through the same duct, the same exchange, or the same provider protects you against much less than it appears to. A modest 4G/5G failover on a different network often provides more real protection than a second fixed line from the same infrastructure.

2. Treat an untested backup as a hope, not a backup. The question is never “do we back up?” It is “when did we last restore something, and how long did it take?” If nobody can answer, you do not yet know whether you have a backup at all.

3. Plan for degraded operation, not just recovery. Full recovery takes as long as it takes. The more useful question is what the business can still do in the meantime. Which systems matter most? What can staff do offline? Who calls whom? Ten minutes of thinking about this before an outage is worth more than an hour of improvisation during one.

4. Buy resilience as a habit, not a project. The Lagos lesson is that resilience is not a line item you purchase once. It is a set of small, repeated decisions: choosing equipment with failure in mind, keeping spares of the cheap things that stop everything when they break, reviewing what changed since last year. Most of it costs discipline rather than money.

How this shapes our work

When we scope IT for a client — whether that is hardware procurement, network infrastructure, or connectivity — the first question we ask is not “how fast?” or “how much?” It is “what happens when this fails?” Sometimes the honest answer is that the risk is small and not worth spending against. But the question gets asked, every time, because we come from an environment where nobody had the luxury of skipping it.

That, more than any piece of equipment, is what running IT in Lagos taught us about running it in London.