Mission Assurance Challenges within the Military Environment

Virtually all modern organizations have embedded information and communication technologies into their core processes as a means to increase operational efficiency, improve decision quality, and reduce operational costs. However, this dependence can place the organizational mission at risk when an incident occurs that compromises a cyber resource critical to the success of the organizational mission. In this paper, the authors examine the challenges of developing and maintaining a mission-wide understanding of organizational mission risk within military environments. Specifically, they examine the concept of mission assurance, discuss various factors which must be taken into account when describing military missions, analyze the four primary types of representations used to capture mission-to-cyber relationships, and highlight the complexities of documenting cyber dependencies for the purpose of achieving mission assurance.