Outsourcing strategies in 2026 are being shaped by persistent disruption. Geopolitical uncertainty, major service outages, talent disruption, and post COVID-19 consolidation initiatives are driving a renewed focus on resilience in outsourcing operations and contracts. In many sourcing relationships, “resilience” is often reflected as a general promise from a vendor—an untested business continuity plan sitting in a document repository. However, in today’s environment, resilience is increasingly becoming a design requirement: it must be embedded into the operating model and enforceable through the contract.
In practice, companies are addressing disruption and resilience by focusing less on a single “best” outsourcing configuration and more on building optionality into the contract—the ability to maintain service continuity and performance standards, reroute work, and access talent as conditions change.
This two-part contract corner focuses on contracting approaches to support impactful and enforceable resilience.
Defining Resilience and Baseline Terms
In the context of an outsourcing agreement, resilience should not be framed simply as “continuity planning.” A more useful definition of resilience is the ability to keep critical services running through unexpected or sudden changes in conditions.
This typically requires three components:
- Portability: The ability to move work between locations, teams, and/or vendor without reinventing the delivery process
- Targeted redundancy: Redundancy where failure is unacceptable (not everywhere)
- Recoverability: Defined recovery objectives that are tested, evidenced, and remediated when gaps are found
From a contracting and drafting perspective, one of the most effective moves is to define a baseline “resilience” schedule (or equivalent exhibit) with measurable obligations that can be reused across vendors and operating models, with strategic customization where the risk profile demands it.
Enforcing Resilience in the Contract
When companies say they want resilience, the question becomes: what do we ask for in the agreement so resilience is real, auditable, and executable?
Below are several provisions worth considering in a baseline resilience schedule:
- Business continuity and disaster recovery (BCP/DR) “with teeth”: Rather than a high-level and aspirational obligation to “maintain a BCP,” a good practice is to define testable and enforceable obligations such as:
- Recovery time objective/recovery point objective requirements by service tier
- Dependency mapping (including critical systems, networks, and key third parties)
- A mandatory test cadence with documented results and remediation deadlines
- Portability standards (the “move the work” flexibility): Portability is key for enabling a realistic transition of operations between vendors, particularly where consolidation has increased concentration risk. Other than general cooperation requirements, obligations and standards to consider are:
- Documentation/runbooks
- Tooling and process standards
- Data export formats and handoff requirements
- Measurable knowledge transfer obligations (e.g., artifacts, training, shadowing)
- Surge capacity as a defined service: Many contracts assume “steady state” operations and delivery. However, resilience planning in today’s environment often requires defining the ability to absorb spikes during disruption through mechanisms such as:
- Hours-to-activate surge response
- Pricing/rate protections (or predefined rate cards)
- Prioritization rules during regional events
- Step-in rights for critical services: Depending on the service scope and risk profile, some organizations also evaluate carefully drafted step-in/intervention rights for “must not fail” services and often include predefined triggers. These provisions should be carefully drafted to avoid unintended liabilities.
- Exit and transition as an operating capability: Instead of treating exit or wind-down assistance as a forgotten provision, an increasing trend is to turn this type of transition assistance into an operating capability and validate that the plan can actually be executed before a crisis forces it. Provisions to consider include:
- Defined exit and transition obligations and tooling handover
- Priced wind down assistance
- A requirement to run a transition drill periodically (even a tabletop exercise)
Part 2 of this contract corner will address additional drafting considerations for geopolitical triggers and global capacity centers and will close with a 90 day action plan and a contract checklist that deal teams can leverage during strategy planning.