Mission-Critical Priorities: The Evolving Landscape of Military Needs and Cybersecurity

What is critical in the military domain is also a moving target.

“It really depends on the mission owner and what’s important to that mission,” said Drew York, Naval Information Warfare Center Atlantic lead systems engineer. “For example, if you are operating a hospital, a medical clinic, then obviously your medical equipment is very important to your mission, but so might be a system with electronic medical records,” York said.

This is increasingly important as the U.S. armed services move deeper into digital medical records, and proper cybersecurity should be incorporated.

“If your mission is, say, someone who is an expeditionary combatant, a fighter, your weapons [systems] may have very different importance to you than someone who isn’t in that role,” York commented.

Therefore, while readiness forces a consideration of variable scenarios—for example, weather cannot be relied on to always be warm or cold—granular thinking leads to looking at the specifics of a service or capability.

“So, what it boils down to is what is important to the mission owner,” York said.