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This could have been fixed by having a minimal baseline of machines not running the same software

Resilience comes from diversity, in computing and in biology. Whether that's having critical workloads on multiple cloud providers or having one user interface on windows on network A (Arista) with crowdstrike and one on a mac on network B (cisco) with Sentinal one

Sometimes perhaps you can't eliminate a single point of failure, but you can sure reduce them to a minimum.

Or you can choose to increase next years bottom line and thus your bonus by not having a robust DR plan or system. You can also skip on boring things like raid and backups.

The trick for a CxO is to ensure that when failure happens, it's massive and widespread. Then it's not your fault. The CxOs in a given industry won't be fired because their DR plans didn't work because they believed Gartner and all their CxO chums in competitors did the same thing.

Nobody got fired for choosing IBM/Microsoft/Cisco/Crowdstrike/Azure, even if it's worse than the alternatives. People do get fired for bucking the trend even when it's measurably more reliable.



The update affected less than 1% of all Windows machines. [1] Although maybe the biggest software failure in history, far from the biggest possible one. The level of cloud connectivity in the world could basically break the world if we didn't have diversity.

[1] https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/07/20/helping-our-cust...


Diversity increases your attack surface however. You rather want redundancy and easy deployment or rollback of your clients and servers


Diversity means a successful attack will take out part of your operation.

Monoculture means a successful attack will take out all of your operation.


That is not a good model.

Cyber attacks rarely take down stuff directly. Rather attackers will establish a bridge head into your organization first and inspect the network and gather data for further (phishing) attacks.

Diversity only means more opportunities to install bridge heads.




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