The burden of platform diversity

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.

Say you’re an all-Mac shop and you use Apple Remote Desktop to administer your network, because it’s a reasonable and manageable way to keep things running smoothly. You use the tool to enable simultaneous updates across your Mac clients. You run the “software difference report” against crashing Macs to see how they are different from standard systems that work; then you use that information to make the machines as alike as possible, because that tactic usually works.

Everything you do as an administrator is geared toward enforcing uniformity across systems, because it promotes operational sanity. If your Mac network were a field of cotton, a tool such as Apple Remote Desktop would uniformly spread the right kind of fertilizer in the right amounts across your entire Mac field. There is nothing wrong with that approach. It helps keep trouble at bay.

The fear of Microsoft monoculture generally stems from security concerns, worries with an obvious basis in reality. But security issues are not the only obstacles to productivity.

Just this week, I was working on a tight timeline to prepare PowerPoint slides for a panel discussion. I decided to use my Mac to build the slides and transfer them to my PC for a quick review before submitting them to the panel moderator (who I knew was using a PC). And guess what? I had to spend a couple of aggravating hours tweaking and realigning my slides for a Windows environment.

I could have stood my ground and nagged the moderator about his choice of platform or self-righteously disrupted the panel to hook up my Mac and use Keynote. As much as I love my PowerBook, I found myself wishing I had just started with the PC. Adhering to a monoculture can be a time-saver.

The same benefits of monoculture are realized on the back end. I can’t imagine shouldering the expense of creating mirrored applications in different environments on our server farm. Therefore, my servers are all running the same operating system and the same key applications at same versions. What other sane way is there?

As a self-styled pundit who actually spends most of his time on day-to-day IT operations, my position here at InfoWorld is somewhat unique. When I have my pundit hat on, I’m theoretically opposed to the march of monoculture in IT — who wouldn’t be? With my IT management hat on, though, I realize that diverse environments avoid certain problems while creating others.

Right now, I’ve got entirely different systems set up to manage our Linux boxes, Mac OS boxes, and Windows boxes. Sometimes I think that embracing monoculture would be a relief.