Mission Assurance is a full life-cycle engineering process to identify and mitigate design, production, test, and field support deficiencies of mission success.
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Mission Assurance includes the disciplined application of system engineering, risk management, quality, and management principles to achieve success of a design, development, testing, deployment, and operations process. Mission Assurance's ideal is achieving 100% customer success every time. Mission Assurance reaches across the enterprise, supply base, business partners, and customer base to enable customer success.[1]
The ultimate goal of Mission Assurance is to create a state of resilience that supports the continuation of an agency's critical business processes and protects its employees, assets, services, and functions. Mission Assurance addresses risks in a uniform and systematic manner across the entire enterprise. [2]
Mission Assurance is an emerging cross-functional discipline that demands its contributors (project management, governance, system architecture, design, development, integration, testing, and operations) provide and guarantee their combined performance in use.[3]
The United States Department of Defense 8500-series of policies has three defined mission assurance categories that form the basis for availability and integrity requirements. [4] [5] A Mission Assurance Category (MAC) is assigned to all DoD systems [6]. It reflects the importance of an information system for the successful completion of a DoD mission. It also determines the requirements for availability and integrity.
NASA's Process Based Mission Assurance Knowledge Based System is an implementation of Mission Assurance that provides "quick and easy access to critical Safety & Mission Assurance data... across all NASA programs and projects." [7]
In practice, the security-focused desires of Information Assurance (IA) to protect data and systems often conflicts with Mission Assurance 'get the job done' attitude. This conflict is largely eliminated when the focus of Information Assurance is bifurcated into (1) protecting the infrastructure and data, and (2) securely sharing information with authorized recipients.