Vodafone 2026 Annual Report

Maintaining Trust continued 57

Vodafone Group Plc Annual Report 2026

Strategic report

Governance

Financials

Other information

Network and IT resilience Network and IT resilience remain a core priority as our services become increasingly essential for consumers, businesses, and governments. Strategy Our group-wide technology policies set out the critical services in scope, recovery objectives, and governance framework. Service level targets define the maximum time to restore services and support alignment of architectural designs with our standards. We continuously measure and monitor system availability across mobile, fixed, IT, and payment platforms. We take proactive actions to identify and mitigate issues, reinforcing recovery discipline and embedding resilience by design. Our approach is guided by the principles of prevention, detection and reaction, supporting early identification of risks and swift response when events occur. We apply recognised industry best practices for service management, and design modern services in line with high availability guidelines. We reduce the risk of subsea cable disruption through diversified routes, strategically located landing stations, and investment in major systems like 2Africa, a global subsea fibre optic cable system connecting Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. By avoiding single points of failure, addressing bottlenecks such as within the Middle East, developing geo‑resilient design and recovery plans, we maintain robust international connectivity. Our Technology Assurance function assesses how well our key resilience controls support effective risk management. This includes performing quality reviews and in depth testing to confirm controls are appropriately designed and operating in line with the requirements set out in our resilience standards.

Group-wide quality reviews and deep-dive assessments across multiple markets have strengthened alignment with our standards and supported ongoing enhancements in recovery planning. We maintained robust incident management practices and effective oversight of third party service providers. While key resilience capabilities are well established, a structured risk remediation process is in place to drive further improvements. In Africa, the theft of copper, batteries and fuel continues to pose operational challenges, driven in part by growth in commodity and fuel prices. These incidents disrupt network sites and increase restoration requirements. To mitigate this risk, Vodacom has strengthened site protection through enhanced surveillance and closer collaboration with private security partners. Looking Ahead Resilience remains a strategic priority as climate, geopolitical, and technology landscapes continue to evolve. In the year ahead, we will continue strengthening power resilience across high criticality sites, while scaling the use of automation and AI to enhance predictive monitoring and self healing capabilities. We will also deepen resilience by design across network modernisation and IT transformation programmes, so that recovery requirements are embedded early in solution design. In parallel, we will reinforce assurance activities for cloud native and digital platforms to validate recoverability as our technology estate continues to modernise. Through these initiatives, we remain focussed on delivering resilient and high performing technology services for customers, businesses and communities, improving reliability and the trusted connectivity our customers rely on every day.

This Year Our teams have followed the resilience-by-design principle, embedding resilience into the design of all solutions. At the same time, we have carefully safeguarded the services in place, so that any modifications do not compromise the resilience levels we have achieved. In addition, we dedicated time to testing recovery solutions, confirming that each single‑function recovery behaved as expected. Recent weather events and energy supply volatility underscored the need to sustain essential services during prolonged power outages. When the Iberian Peninsula blackout happened in April 2025, we immediately responded to maintain operational services and have taken broader insights to inform our approach. Core network sites already have a high level of protection, but to enhance our overall resilience we are increasing battery backup capabilities in selected sites covering critical areas and strengthening our operational procedures. Additionally, we continue to evaluate new ways to extend site survivability during power outages by implementing new power‑saving modes. Automation is being explored to reduce intervention time, improve operational efficiency, and maximise the available backup power to support more resilient and reliable network performance. We continued our digital transformation to cloud which brings increased geo-distribution and higher availability. Our strategic data centre consolidation programme is driving enhanced resilience for critical workloads by leveraging the capabilities of our strategic hyperscaler partnerships.

Globally, the impact of natural disasters and geopolitical tension is increasing overall resilience risk. While major incidents are uncommon, they remain a possibility, particularly given the reach of our global footprint. Our ambition is to continually strengthen the network and IT services used to deliver our critical services to avoid impact to our customers and recover quickly following adverse events.