{"id":34974,"date":"2024-08-08T06:24:36","date_gmt":"2024-08-08T10:24:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eginnovations.com\/blog\/?p=34974"},"modified":"2025-03-18T06:30:22","modified_gmt":"2025-03-18T10:30:22","slug":"heterogeneous-it-architectures-a-strategy-for-resilience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eginnovations.com\/blog\/heterogeneous-it-architectures-a-strategy-for-resilience\/","title":{"rendered":"Heterogeneous IT Architectures – A Strategy for Resilience"},"content":{"rendered":"
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As the dust settles from the CrowdStrike outages we reflect on how adopting a heterogeneous IT strategy when adopting technologies can increase your organization\u2019s resilience against outages and mitigate risks.<\/p>\n

None of eG Innovations\u2019 product lines were impacted by the CrowdStrike outages (a reasonable overview of cause and impact in: CrowdStrike outage: We finally know what caused it – and how much it cost | CNN Business)<\/a> because we simply don\u2019t rebrand other vendors\u2019 driver technology within our products. We operate with a large government and enterprise customer base globally and such a model isn\u2019t appropriate within the regulated environments eG Enterprise is often deployed in.<\/p>\n

Some of our customers were unfortunately affected by what some are labelling the \u201cworst IT outage\u201d<\/a> the world has ever seen\u201d as they leverage CrowdStrike purchased and supported directly. And we sympathize and support them as they return to normality. Small comfort to the millions stranded in airports but in practice it is currently estimated that less than 1% of Windows endpoints worldwide were affected. Endpoints running Linux, Mac and other OSs were unaffected.<\/p>\n

Some organizations 100% reliant on Windows were completely wiped out whilst others could muddle through with their non-Windows systems. Many are now considering whether, as in human resources recruitment, a bit of \u201cdiversity\u201d might not be a bad thing!<\/p>\n

The Dutch Elm Disease Analogy – with Respect to Heterogeneous IT<\/h2>\n

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\nDutch Elm Disease serves as an effective analogy for why it may be prudent to diversify your IT operating system landscape beyond Microsoft Windows. Just as Dutch Elm Disease decimated elm tree populations due to their genetic uniformity, a homogeneous IT environment is similarly vulnerable to widespread disruption. When an entire network relies on a single operating system, a targeted malware or ransomware attack (or in CrowdStrike\u2019s case a likely innocent but flaky QA process) can compromise every connected device, leading to catastrophic failures.<\/p>\n

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What is Dutch Elm Disease?<\/h2>\n

Dutch Elm Disease, was first identified in the UK in the 1920s,<\/a> and became devastating in the 1970s, killing over 20 million elm trees. Spread by bark beetles and caused by the fungus Ophiostoma novo-ulmi,<\/a> it led to significant losses in the elm population, transforming the British landscape and prompting extensive tree management efforts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Diversifying your OS landscape introduces a variety of systems, akin to planting different tree species. This strategy enhances resilience, as not all systems will be susceptible to the same threats. For instance, while a Windows-specific virus may incapacitate systems running Windows, devices operating on Linux or macOS remain unaffected, ensuring continuity of critical operations. Bunging a few oaks amongst those elms may even slow the spread of the disease \u2013 making is a little harder for the hackers (or bark beetles) to hop between systems.<\/p>\n

Moreover, a diverse IT environment may encourage innovation and offer advantages of \u201cbest-in-class” adoption. Different operating systems often excel in different areas \u2014 Linux for its security, open-source ecosystem and stability, macOS for its user-friendly interface (oh so beloved of earnest designers and architects<\/a>), and Windows for its widespread application support. Leveraging these strengths allows organizations to tailor their IT infrastructure to meet varied needs and application workload demands more effectively.<\/p>\n

In essence, just as biodiversity safeguards ecosystems against disease and environmental changes, OS diversity fortifies IT infrastructure against cyber threats and operational challenges, ensuring greater security, robustness, and adaptability.<\/p>\n

Is Heterogenous IT the Right Strategy for You?<\/h2>\n

Whilst a heterogeneous IT strategy offers resilience and flexibility by using diverse operating systems, it inevitably comes with downsides. It requires a wider range of staff skills, increasing training costs and complexity. Maintenance overheads are higher due to varied systems needing unique support. License management can also be a pain and collaboration can be challenging across different platforms.<\/p>\n

Personally, I think it depends on the size of an organization and what the critical functions within that organization are and how they are entwined and interdependent. For an organization standardized on Windows based Outlook for email, a back-up system based on Linux may be a wise move. If email is a critical function or all your communication mechanisms are based on one OS this may be one to risk assess.<\/p>\n

6 Ways eG Enterprise Helps Empower Resilience via a Heterogeneous IT Strategy<\/h2>\n

1. Breadth of technologies covered<\/h3>\n

eG Enterprise was designed to be a single pane of glass observability solution designed to monitor each technology via domain aware and specific intelligence but via a single simple to use GUI interface that requires minimal training to use.<\/p>\n

This means that if you want to add a bit of Linux VDI<\/a>, as part of a heterogeneous IT strategy, alongside your Windows DaaS or VDI you need minimal effort to monitor it and your help desk operators on L1\/L2 support will need little or perhaps no extra training to use eG Enterprise on a different genre of OS.<\/p>\n

More than 500+ different technologies are supported by eG Enterprise, for details of specific technologies \u2013 see: End-to-End Monitoring: Applications, Cloud, Containers (eginnovations.com).<\/a><\/p>\n\n \n