Mission-critical

A mission critical factor of a system is any factor (component, equipment, personnel, process, procedure, software, etc.) that is essential to business operation or to an organization. Failure or disruption of mission critical factors will result in serious impact on business operations or upon an organization, and even can cause social turmoil and catastrophes.

A mission critical system is a system that is essential to the survival of a business or organization. When a mission critical system fails or is interrupted, business operations are significantly impacted. Mission essential equipment and mission critical application are also known as mission critical system. Examples of mission critical systems are: an online banking system, railway/aircraft operating and control systems, electric power systems, and many other computer systems that will adversely affect business and society when they fail.

A good example of a mission critical system is a navigational system for a spacecraft. The difference between mission critical and business critical lies in the major adverse impact and the very real possibilities of loss of life, serious injury and/or financial loss.

There are four different types of critical systems: mission critical, business critical, safety critical and security critical. The key difference between a safety critical system and mission critical system, is that safety critical system is a system that, if it fails, may result in serious environmental damage, injury, or loss of life, while mission critical system may result in failure in goal-directed activity. An example of a safety critical system is a chemical manufacturing plant control system. Mission critical system and business critical system are similar terms, but a business critical system fault can influence only a single company or an organization and can partially stop lifetime activity (hours or days). So it also can be used as a mission critical system in the business. Failure of it will cause very high cost loss for the business. Security critical system may lead to loss of sensitive data through theft or accidental loss. All these four systems are generalized as critical system.

As a rule in crisis management, if a triage-type decision is made in which certain components must be eliminated or delayed, e.g. because of resource or personnel constraints, mission critical ones must not be among them.

Every business companies and organizations will have mission critical if they are functioning. Downed filtration system will cause the water filtration company to malfunction. In this case, the water filtration system is a mission critical system. If gas system is downed, many restaurants and bakeries will have to shut down until the system function well again. In this case, the gas system is a mission critical system. Other than those, there are various mission critical that if malfunctions, will cause serious impact on the industries or organizations.

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