Mission assurance

Aspects of Mission Assurance

Mission assurance is the disciplined use of system engineering, risk management, quality, and management principles to ensure success throughout design, development, testing, deployment, and operations. Its goal is to achieve perfect customer success every time, and it works across the entire enterprise, including the supply base, business partners, and customer base.

The ultimate aim is to build a state of resilience that keeps an agency’s critical business processes running and protects its employees, assets, services, and functions. Risks are handled uniformly and systematically across the whole organization. As a newer cross-functional field, mission assurance requires contributors from project management, governance, system architecture, design, development, integration, testing, and operations to guarantee their combined performance when the system is in use.

The U.S. Department of Defense’s 8500-series policies define three mission assurance categories that set availability and integrity requirements. Every DoD system gets a Mission Assurance Category (MAC), which shows how important that system is to completing a DoD mission and determines its availability and integrity needs. MAC I systems handle information that is vital to the operational readiness or effectiveness of deployed or contingency forces.

Losing MAC I data would severely damage mission success, so these systems must have the highest levels of integrity and availability and use the most rigorous protections. MAC II systems handle information important to supporting deployed and contingency forces. Losing a MAC II system could significantly hurt mission success or operational readiness. Loss of integrity for MAC II data is unacceptable, so these systems must maintain the highest integrity level.

Loss of availability can be tolerated only briefly, so they need a medium level of availability. MAC II systems require protective measures that go beyond industry best practices to ensure adequate data integrity and availability.