Only Mission Critical (was RE: Denial of service)

["Anton J Aylward, CISSP" <anton () the-wire com>]

At 10:08 AM 24/08/98 -0500, Biggerstaff, Craig T wrote:
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> I just want to point out, and rail against, the cheapening of the phrase
> "mission-critical".  Ever since this phrase was made a
> Buzzword-of-the-Month-Club selection by inexplicably popular authors of
> management advice, it has become damn near useless.  A company that is
> unable to disseminate press releases on its web site is not in any real
> sense unable to function, it simply has to revert to the way things were
> done five years ago.
>
> -- Craig Biggerstaff

Right on!
Once upon a time, before the bizz-word writers latched hold of it,
we used this to describe a resource which would not cause the
plane to fall out of the sky, but meant it could not complete its 
mission objectives.   We also had the term "flight critical", which
described the issues which _COULD_ make the plane fall out of 
sky.

But like so many other terms, describing MS-DOS as an "operating 
system" for example, the debasement of the terminology by the 
marketeers was all part of the content free hurrah.

The problem with euphemisms is that they remove two words (or
phrases) from the language, themselves and the one they are a
euphemism for.   MIssion-critical == flight critical only if 
a) you get shot for not completing the mission, or
b) the design is so bad that any failure, not matter how minor
    or transitory, is a catastrophe, or
c) there are no backups or redundancies.

In short:
Your wings falling off are flight critical, but
if you use up too much fuel in a dogfight and
won't be able to make the surveillance target
and back to base, so have to turn around
early, that's mission critical.   But you can always
try again tomorrow.

The trouble is, we've been playing video games for
too long, and you can always drop another quarter
and get three more planes.   <*sigh*>


So if PowerPoint raises a GPF before you save your 
presentation and you have to start over and retype
it all, that's only mission-critical.

If the hackers break into your bank and empty your account
the day before you have to pay off the Mafia loan sharks,
that's flight critical.

/anton - 

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Anton J Aylward, CISSP  | "Quality refers to the extent to which 
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