By Deepa K C, Head of Infrastructure and Cloud at Vodafone Intelligent Solutions
Someone asked me recently what the hardest part of leading infrastructure through the last few years has been. I didn’t say the supply chain chaos, or the vendor renegotiations, or the three-in-the-morning calls when a critical system went sideways.
I said: staying calm when everyone around you is waiting for you to panic.
That, more than any technical challenge, is what this moment demands of us.
The landscape changed while we were looking elsewhere
I’ve spent over two decades in infrastructure. I’ve navigated mergers, cloud migrations, and enough “transformation programmes” to fill a bookshelf. But nothing quite prepared me for the specific texture of disruption we’re living through now — where geopolitics shows up uninvited in your procurement decisions, your vendor contracts, and your architecture reviews.
Hardware lead times that used to be weeks became quarters. Vendors we’d relied on for years suddenly carried political risk we’d never thought to assess. Data residency stopped being a compliance checkbox and became a genuine strategic question — one with real consequences if you got it wrong.
The technical problems were hard. What surprised me more was how much of my job became about reading the room — sensing where the next disruption might come from, well before it showed up in a briefing note.
What senior leadership has taught me about this moment ?
I won’t pretend the path to where I sit was straightforward. As a senior woman in a field that hasn’t always made space for us, I learned early that authority isn’t handed to you — you build it, steadily, through the quality of your judgement and the consistency of your presence. Especially in a crisis.
What that experience gave me — and what I see in the most effective infrastructure leaders right now — is a particular kind of steadiness. Not the bravado of having all the answers. Something quieter and, I think, more useful: the ability to hold uncertainty without letting it become paralysis. To make a call with incomplete information and stand behind it. To bring your team with you even when the path isn’t fully visible yet.
Those instincts — built over years of having to be twice as prepared and half as reactive — turn out to be exactly what resilient leadership looks like in geopolitically volatile times.
What we’ve actually changed ?
We’ve rebuilt our vendor strategy with redundancy as a design principle rather than an afterthought. We ask different questions now: not just “is this vendor reliable?” but “where are they incorporated, and what happens to our access if that changes?” We’ve run dependency fire drills — genuinely uncomfortable exercises that force us to answer what breaks if a key supplier or region becomes unavailable tomorrow.
We’ve also had to get much better at translating infrastructure risk into business language. The conversations I’m having with the board today would have been unthinkable five years ago. That shift — from cost centre to strategic function — didn’t happen automatically. It happened because we made the case, consistently, in terms they could act on.
What I’d tell my younger self?
Build the relationships before you need them. With legal. With procurement. With finance. Resilience isn’t an IT problem — it never was. The leaders navigating this well are the ones who understood that early and acted accordingly.
And when things get turbulent: don’t perform calm. Actually find it. Your team is watching — and they’ll take their cue from you.
That, in the end, is what this role asks of all of us.
