Vendor Diversity Is Critical in Network Deployments: The Security and Cost Benefits

There is a common threat that exists between these seemingly unrelated events. That threat is the weakness caused by uniformity. Let's start with the AT&T frame relay outage. First, AT&T made the choice to implement its entire frame relay network with devices from the same vendor. This inherently created a serious and common weakness - the entire infrastructure would be vulnerable to any bug or flaw. In this case, the weakness was triggered accidentally, but one has seen many cases where flaws are exploited maliciously. Some of the responsibility for the widespread impact of this crash should also be borne by the customers themselves - one should not trust a business critical service to a single service provider!