Single pain of glass?

An abiding desire in Cyber, IT and technology management is to establish a ‘single pane of glass’: a unified command and control plane that covers your technology estate.

The rationale is simple and unarguable: you’re far less likely to miss a cyber attack, patching or other systems maintenance if you’re only looking in one place. Further, you’re likely to get better overall cost of ownership since you benefit from economies of scale and only having to have staff who know one system.

The concept extends beyond IT. In systems architecture we strive to standardize, simplify and add scale, based on years of accumulated experience showing that complexity adds cost and reduces flexibility.

Yet the events of yesterday clearly demonstrate the risk: if everything can be managed from one system then that one system can bring everything to its knees. Similarily if everything routes or depends on one system. Make no mistake, this will happen again. Human error is as sure in life as taxes.

In human management most organizations embrace diversity, recognizing that a diverse organization brings disparate strengths and resiliance. Maybe it’s time to challenge our desire for homogeneity in IT and systems architecutre? Instead, a one plus one strategy:

• Windows and Linux in the cloud (on two hyperscalers)
• Mac and Windows as client devices
• iOS and Android for phones
• Two patch and cyber security management systems, each deployed to half of the estate

You get the idea. There’s plenty of nuance here to think about, in particular dependencies within single planes: if a Windows system is dependent on a Linux system and you loose all the Linux servers your Windows system is still out.

It won’t be cheaper either: scale benefit is halved at negotiation time and staff must have a broader skill set.

This will happen again. Maybe the added cost is worth it if your cleanup time is halved?