Resilience is a property of a distributed computation network that is defined by the ability to “provide and maintain an acceptable level of service in the face of faults and challenges to normal operation.”
Threats and challenges for services can range from simple misconfiguration over large scale natural disasters to targeted attacks. The importance of network resilience is continuously increasing, as communication networks are becoming a fundamental component in the operation of critical infrastructures. Consequently, fforts focus on interpreting and improving network and computing resilience with applications to critical infrastructures. As an example, one can consider as a resilience objective the provisioning of services over the network, instead of the services of the network itself. This may require coordinated response from both the network and from the services running on top of the network.
Note that resilience and survivability are terms that can be used interchangeably.