In praise of monoculture

From this week's InfoWorld column:

Working in IT involves a certain bit of idealism, which can be either a positive or negative force. When idealism gets out of control, it frequently obscures the practical considerations that make corporate IT work.

Take the concept of monoculture. In agriculture, monoculture refers to the cultivation of a single crop; for example, you bet the farm on cotton alone. In IT, the monoculture discussion often centers on whether it’s wise to bet the farm on an all-Microsoft environment, knowing that your systems could get wiped out by the latest worm or virus.

But what about all the advantages of monoculture in IT? Before my valued readers fire off their “you are a shill for Microsoft!” letters, let me point out that successful non-Microsoft approaches also lean toward monoculture of one sort or another.

Read the rest. I don't really write much about Microsoft in this column, but don't think I'm letting them off the hook. It's just that that horse has been absolutely flogged to death (not undeservedly).

The absolute antithesis to OS monoculture would be an unmanageable tangle of systems in which every system was different than all the others, providing the most resiliency to common attacks. In my experience, this sort of environment is indicative of an overall lack of IT strategy and general inattention to systems management. When all your systems are the same and uniformly managed (whether OS X, Windows XP, Linux, or whatever), it usually reflects a reasoned approach to the environment.

Posted by Chad Dickerson at June 29, 2004 10:08 AM