Word of the Day: mission-critical application

Word of the Day Daily updates on the latest technology terms | September 2, 2019 mission-critical application 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.   Although many companies today use cloud storage to provide redundancy for their mission-critical apps, the question of whether or not to actually host mission-critical applications in the cloud is still quite controversial and the choice depends on many variables, including regulatory compliance requirements and trust in the cloud provider's ability to provide security and meet service level agreements (SLAs). Quote of the Day "When deploying a mission-critical application, we need to test and validate both the functionality of the application and the capabilities of the infrastructure." - Niel Nickolaisen Trending Terms uptime and downtime IT performance management hot backup scalability disaster recovery N+1 UPS automatic vehicle locator (AVL) service leval agreement (SLA) Learning Center Cloud and containers rewrite monitoring and management rulebooks Modern IT is undeniably more flexible with the abstraction layers of cloud and containers -- but is it still hitting performance goals? Only if ops teams change tactics. Mission-critical IoT: What every business needs to know to prosper Keysight Technologies' Cheryl Ajluni offers three things any business or product maker can do starting today to improve their chance of mission-critical IoT success. Dell EMC: Time for hyper-converged, but not for mission critical Hyper-converged vs converged infrastructure: Dell EMC says hyper-converged isn?t ready for mission-critical applications, but may be by the end of the year. Evolving data protection technologies require attention There are lots of threats out there, but these are 'exciting times' for data protection technologies, according to Arcserve's vice president of products. Puppet on why people, process and technology are mission critical to DevOps success At the PuppetConf user and partner summit in San Francisco, Puppet and its customers shared insights on how best to address the people, process and technology sides of the DevOps success equation. Quiz Yourself An operating system (OS) is the ________ that, after being initially loaded into the computer by a boot program, manages all the other programs in a computer. a. program b. software c. application Answer Stay in Touch For feedback about any of our definitions or to suggest a new definition, please contact me at: mrouse@techtarget.com Visit the Word of the Day Archives and catch up on what you've missed! FOLLOW US About This E-Newsletter This e-newsletter is published by the TechTarget network. To unsubscribe from Whatis.com, click here. Please note, this will not affect any other subscriptions you have signed up for. TechTarget, Whatis, 275 Grove Street, Newton, MA 02466. Contact: webmaster@techtarget.com Copyright 2018 TechTarget. All rights reserved.