When Downtime Is Not an Option: What Shipping Can Teach Us About Resilience

08/09/2026 / Miscellaneous

In shipping, a delay rarely stays in one place.

A system goes down at a port, a shipment cannot be processed, a truck is left waiting.

One disruption can quickly affect operations far beyond the system where it started.

That is one reason the shipping industry offers an interesting perspective on something every growing digital business has to consider:

What happens when the systems you depend on, are suddenly unavailable?

The Maersk lesson

In June 2017, A.P. Moller–Maersk was hit by the NotPetya malware attack. What began as a cyber incident quickly became an operational one.

Systems had to be shut down, applications and data became unavailable and a large number of manual workarounds had to be introduced to keep serving customers. Maersk later estimated the financial impact at between $200 and $300 million.

The important part of the story is not simply that a major company was attacked. It is what happened afterwards.

When digital systems stopped working, people had to find other ways to keep the operation moving. That is a very different problem from fixing a server or restoring an application. It is a business continuity problem.

The real cost of an outage

Modern shipping depends on a network of connected systems. Ships, ports, terminals, logistics providers and customers exchange information constantly. As the industry has become more digital, this connectivity has brought efficiency, but also greater dependence on technology.

The same is true in other industries.

An e-commerce company depends on its website, payments and order management. A business may depend on its ERP to process orders and manage inventory. A service company may rely on cloud applications simply to communicate with customers and employees.

When everything works, this dependence is almost invisible. It becomes obvious when something stops.

Resilience is more than preventing failure

This is where the shipping industry has an interesting lesson to offer. The goal cannot always be to make failure impossible. Systems fail, networks go down, human errors and cyberattacks can happen.

The more useful question is what happens when they do.

Can critical services be restored quickly? Is there a reliable backup? Are recovery procedures tested? Can the business continue operating, even in a limited way, while systems are being restored?

The International Maritime Organization (IMO) has increasingly approached cyber risk from this perspective. Its guidelines focus not only on identifying and protecting systems, but also on detecting, responding to and recovering from incidents.

That shift matters.

Because resilience is about having an infrastructure that can absorb disruption without bringing the entire business to a standstill, not about having the perfect infrastructure.

A lesson that goes beyond shipping

Shipping has learned to operate with disruption as a possibility, not an exception. Weather changes, port congestion, technical failures or unexpected incidents can all affect operations.

For businesses on land, the circumstances may be different, but the principle is the same. As operations become increasingly dependent on digital infrastructure, an unexpected disruption can quickly affect everything around it.

The lesson from shipping: Being prepared makes the difference between a setback and an operation that keeps moving.

When disruption hits, can your business stay on course?

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