missionCritical

Mission-critical refers to any system, process, or activity whose operation is essential to an organization’s core mission. In practice, a mission-critical item must function continuously and reliably; its failure would cause major disruption, significant financial loss, legal or safety risks, or an inability to meet legal or contractual obligations. The term is widely used in information technology, manufacturing, healthcare, finance, and public safety.

Key characteristics include high availability, fault tolerance, and resilience. Mission-critical assets typically employ redundancy and robust failover mechanisms, comprehensive backup and disaster recovery plans, and strict change management. Availability targets are expressed through metrics such as Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO), with industries aiming for varying levels of uptime, sometimes 99.9% or higher, including five nines in critical sectors.

Design and management: organizations perform business impact analyses to identify mission-critical components and assess risks. Critical systems are designed with redundancy (N+1, hot/warm/cold standby), diverse network paths, power backup, and secure data replication. Regular testing, monitoring, and incident response exercises are essential, as are documentation, maintenance, and compliance with applicable standards and regulations.

Examples: mission-critical systems include air traffic control, emergency dispatch, hospital patient monitoring and electronic health records, financial trading platforms, payment processing, power grid SCADA, industrial control systems, and critical manufacturing automation.

See also: business continuity, disaster recovery, safety-critical systems, uptime, redundancy.