Energy resilience is critical to maintaining operations and reducing commercial risk. For example, if a food manufacturer experiences a power failure, that could have negative repercussions on the business. How the food manufacturer deals with the power failure — for example, whether or not it has a backup system, how fast the backup kicks in, and how much or how little product is lost due to the outage — makes up its
business continuity, or a company's ability to continue operations following a disruption.
Energy resilience for business continuity is therefore an important aspect of risk management. Energy resilience is also one of the elements of
business resilience, or a
company's ability to adapt in a changing environment, according to the ISO.
The difference between business resilience and business continuity is that the first refers to how a company evolves in response to lasting change, while the second refers to how a company responds to an unforeseen event.