mission critical
Failure not allowed
Mission critical describes systems, tasks, or components essential to an operation's success—if they fail, everything fails.
The term originated in aerospace and military contexts, where mission-critical equipment could mean the difference between life and death: The backup generator is mission critical.
Now common in business and technology: Email servers are mission critical for most companies.
Often hyphenated when used as an adjective before a noun.
- essentialFundamentally necessary
- vitalEssential or sustaining existence
- urgentNeeding immediate attention
- high stakesSignificant potential for loss
- priorityStatus of greater importance
operational · systems · failure · disaster recovery · business continuity · downtime · redundancy · backup · infrastructure · enterprise · server · uptime · reliability · core · deployment · stakes · pressure · crunch time
- buzzwordssynergy, leverage, paradigm, stakeholder, scalable
- office jargonsynergy, circle back, touch base, deep dive, action item
- prioritypriority, top priority, high priority, low-priority, first priority
- corporate jargonsynergy, stakeholders, deep dive, circle back, leverage
- military commandsattention, halt, fall back, advance, attack
- missionschurch planting, apostle, convert, apostleship, evangelization
mission criticaloptional
Not mandatory
nonessential · dispensable · nice-to-have · unnecessary · expendable
mission criticallow-priority
Lacking immediate importance
backburner · deprioritized · nice-to-have · wish list · stretch goal
mission criticaldispensable
Able to be sacrificed
disposable · replaceable · redundant · surplus · extraneous
mission, critical, missions, missionary, missionaries, emitting, emission, emissions, emissary