Title: 4.4 - Examples of Mission Critical, Business Critical, and Important Scenarios
Course: Introduction to Mission Critical > Section: Introduction to Mission Critical

Click here for a downloadable version of this document: Mission Critical versus Business Critical

Mission Critical versus Business Critical (or Just Important)

Photo: Markus Spiske / www.temporausch.com / CC-BY

Personal Examples

Mission Critical
Imagine yourself at home on a cold winter night. Out of nowhere your lights dim, then flicker, and then your power goes out.

You can’t entertain yourself by watching television, your computer was not fully charged so you cannot watch a movie there, and you now have no Internet to catch up on emails or social media. Your heat is not working. You cannot use your microwave, your electric stove, or your oven to cook. At this point you realize that in your own personal life, your electricity is mission critical [3].

Business Critical

During the early summer, you come home from work and find that things are a bit warmer in your home than you expected. You walk over to the thermostat, and sure enough it is 80 degrees. You double check the thermostat and find that it is set to air conditioning and should be cooling to a comfortable 70 degrees. Yes, the air conditioner seems to be broken.

Ceiling fans, small electric fans or tower fans can be used to give added comfort. Opening the windows may prove a little helpful, especially if a breeze is blowing. Your life has not quite come to a standstill, but over time this could cause you more problems. If you think about it, you realize that your air conditioning (in this situation) is similar to a business critical function.

Important

A wreck up the street from your home has broken a pole that carried the cable to your neighborhood. As a result, your entire cable package has become useless until the cable company sends someone out to repair the damage. That bundle of services sure sounded convenient at the time you opted for it, and saving money on your television service, telephone, and Internet service was a pretty good decision…you think.

You have a cell phone and are able to call for help in case of emergencies. It sure is an aggravation to not have the Internet or television though. If this were to be something that took months to fix you would definitely have to consider other vendors for these services, but most likely you will have your service restored by this time tomorrow.

If you think about this situation, you can see it is very similar to an important function in an organization.

Business Examples

Mission Critical

So, in business, how do we determine what is really mission critical, what could more appropriately be deemed business critical, and what is really just important? As mentioned earlier in the course, the loss of a particular aspect of business that causes the following are indeed mission critical:
- Serious injury or loss of life
- Fines or penalties of amounts prohibitory to a profit
- Regulatory requirements not met
- Major direct loss of revenue
- Severe customer dissatisfaction

If you can make the comparison try to think of your business and the systems, services, and products you offer in terms of you and your power at home. Does the customer have very little option left of anything to do if they are not able to utilize your product or service? Does one area of your own business come to a stand-still and thus cause a loss of production and revenue for your business?

Examples could include:
- A complete lack of availability of diesel fuel to a data center that depends on it to fuel its backup generators.
- A complete inability to access the database for a company that relies on a database to access prices, inventory, and order more product.
- A company utilizing cloud data storage losing the ability to access key data for periods long enough to make normal operations impossible therefore causing severe dissatisfaction among their own customers.

Business Critical

Let’s say you run a department store that has eight check-out lanes. The cash registers on two of your lanes completely stop working. This is highly inconvenient, and depending on the traffic in your store during this time frame, can be an annoyance to both customer and employee. However, you can reroute customers to the remaining six fully functioning cash registers. Your business should not come to a halt, there should not be sufficient wait time incurred by customers to cause severe customer dissatisfaction, no lives are lost, and no loss of revenue should occur. This would be a business critical situation and possibliy require a repair, but would not be considered mission critical.

Important!

In the same business discussed above, if one cash register stopped working periodically and all the rest were in complete working order, this might be what you simply deem important, very important, or even called business important – this would not be considered business critical. (After all, every business has to plan ahead for the possibilities of equipment failure and downtime.)