What Constitutes Mission-Critical in Small Business IT Systems?

Summary: Determining what is mission-critical and what isn’t can help businesses prioritize appropriately.

For IT systems, there are various areas that are not recognized as mission-critical. What constitutes mission-critical from business-critical? With numerous studies expanding the idea of what constitutes mission-critical, a larger spectrum of workloads and applications are being looked at in a different light.

First off, your true mission-critical systems are ERP and transaction processing systems – those are a given. However, is CRM considered mission critical? What about HR or finance?

Typically, you’d consider mission-critical systems as those that are essential to the organization’s survival. If mission-critical system were to go down at any period of time, the company would be certainly in major trouble. For instance, if any transaction procession systems were to be compromise, there would undoubtedly be chaos and panic occurring – revenue streams will essentially stop. An example of this would be for an airport’s reservation system to go down for a long period of time.

Many mission-critical systems will get the bulk of the IT budget when it comes to security, recovery, and availability. However, when it comes to expanding mission critical, it may require one to reorder budget priorities or reallocating IT resources – which is typically not the easiest thing to do. If one were to incorporate mission critical A/V integrators into a company, there would have to be a certain amount of finances set aside in order to proceed with the installation.

There are numerous changes and enhancements in the technology field that have made businesses rethink the question of what’s mission-critical. For example, social media is providing new customer facing strategies and systems to a variety of businesses. Should this be treated as mission-critical?

For all your custom IT control center needs, Constant Technologies, Inc. is your one-stop destination. Visit them online today.