WHITE PAPER
Buy vs Build: Deploying a Cyber Survivable Operating Environment
mrcy.com 5
Learn more
Visit: mrcy.com
Contact us
The Mercury Systems logo is a registered trademark of Mercury Systems, Inc. Other marks used herein may be trademarks or registered
trademarks of their respective holders. Mercury products identified in this document conform with the specifications and standards described
herein. Conformance to any such standards is based solely on Mercury 's internal processes and methods. The information contained in this
document is subject to change at any time without notice.
© 2026 Mercury Systems, Inc. 8231.00E-1026-wp-BvB-CyberSurvivableOperating
MADE IN USA
Corporate Headquarters
50 Minuteman Road
Andover, MA 01810 USA
+1 978.967.1401 tel
+1 866.627.6951 tel
+1 978.256.3599 fax
EMEA Headquarters
Avenue Eugène-Lance, 38
PO Box 584
CH-1212 Grand-Lancy 1
Geneva, Switzerland
+41 22 884 51 00 tel
includes a CVE Analysis and Augmentation Methodology that
supplements the standard CVE scoring system to account
for and take advantage of RelianceOne mitigations and policy
enforcement, enabling administrators to prioritize security
updates accurately against their specific threat model. By
updating intelligently, programs can make better informed
decisions about when new configurations should be applied to
platforms, and they can postpone updates during heightened
states of readiness knowing that the RelianceOne OE mitigates
the risk.
After determining what changes to an operating environment 's
configuration are necessary, the impact to security controls
and policies must be considered. Cyber survivability depends
not only on having robust security controls, but on maintaining
them consistently as systems evolve. Manual policy
management introduces configuration drift, one of the most
common sources of latent vulnerabilities in fielded systems.
To support policy management the sustainment platform
includes Ansible playbooks that integrate RelianceOne for
Linux security policy and filesystems with automation, so that
security policies are managed, deployed, verified, and updated
alongside the operating system and mission applications.
Finally, building and validating a cyber-sur vivable operating
environment requires more than technical innovation.
It demands a disciplined and repeatable process. The
sustainment platform also includes threat models,
standardized design ar tifacts, and a test harness.
CONCLUSION
Most critical edge systems operate in hostile environments
where adversaries have every incentive to identify and exploit
vulnerabilities. Sophisticated adversaries have the potential to
exploit latent software vulnerabilities both before and during
battlefield engagements. Add to this the cost, schedule,
and logistical impact of modernizing existing software and
hardware to take advantage of emerging implementation
technologies such as containers, virtualization, server
management, and advanced processing solutions, a large gap
remains in rapidly developing, deploying, and maintaining OEs
that achieve cyber survivability.
Mercury 's RelianceOne OE, a cyber-survivable operating
environment builds on the proven secure processing
foundation of the RelianceOne suite, already deployed across
edge systems. Additionally, today commercial and defense
programs earn their right to field by assembling evidence for
hundreds of NIST SP 800-53 controls, most of which programs
implement themselves and then re-implement at every
baseline change. The RelianceOne OE satisfies the technical
controls that consume the most engineering effort, including
access enforcement, least privilege, boundary protection,
protection of information at rest, software and firmware
integrity, and configuration settings. The sustainment
platform then keeps the controls consistent as the system
evolves, which directly mitigates configuration drift. field by
assembling evidence for hundreds of NIST SP 800-53 controls,
most of which programs implement themselves and then
re-implement at every baseline change. The RelianceOne
OE satisfies the technical controls that consume the most
engineering effort, including access enforcement, least
privilege, boundary protection, protection of information
at rest, software and firmware integrity, and configuration
settings. The sustainment platform then keeps the controls
consistent as the system evolves, which directly mitigates
configuration drift.
