A mission-critical application is a software program or suite of
related programs that must function continuously in order for a business or
segment of a business to be successful. If a mission-critical application
experiences even brief downtime, the negative consequences are likely to be
financial. In addition to lost productivity, a mission-critical app's failure
to function may also damage the business' reputation.
Examples of mission-critical
applications vary from industry to industry. For example, an automatic vehicle
locator (AVL) app might be mission-critical for an ambulance company but if a
plumbing business uses the same software, it may be characterized as important,
but not essential.
When deploying
mission-critical software, information technology (IT) administrators must
determine exactly what support is necessary to ensure an application's ability
to function under sub-optimal circumstances. For example, if a server handles
transactional data, it should have multiple, redundant power supplies to keep
the server running in the event of a power outage.
Depending on the company's
budget and data center physical infrastructure, mission-critical applications
require N+1 redundancy at a minimum. Making sure that help desk support is
available 24/7 can also help administrators make sure mission-critical
applications are always available, as can frequent and automated backups to
protect applications from corruption or deletion.
IT administrators often tier
their disaster recovery plans to prioritize the restoration of mission-critical
applications and sometimes choose not to update mission-critical applications
as frequently as lower priority applications in order to reduce the risk of
introducing changes that might cause problems.
Comments
Post a Comment