ITPEC FE Subject A April 2026 Question 43

A system whose failure has a significant impact on corporate activities and society — "mission-critical" describes the consequence of an outage, not the technology.

Banking settlement, airline reservation, power grid control and telecom switching are typical: when they stop, the business stops and the damage reaches customers and society. Such systems are therefore built with redundancy, strict change control and fast recovery.

Answer (b)

Why not others:

• •(a) — describes infrastructure such as an OS that other software needs in order to run; being a prerequisite is not the same as causing business and social damage on failure
• •(c) — describes a pilot installation, a rollout approach rather than a property of the system
• •(d) — describes a system running near its capacity limit, a performance concern

Key rule: Criticality is judged by the impact of failure, and that impact is what justifies the investment in redundancy, monitoring and recovery.

System Strategy · AI-written, may contain errors