The Handshake Problem

These days we hear about IT outages and data breaches every day. Many times these breaches or outages result from simple misconfigurations that seem to be preventable. Many armchair analysts will claim that a few minutes of work would have prevented or mitigated many issues related to any of these incidents. However many of these companies are not stupid. They are facing a serious struggle.

Most organizations are completely willing to implement best practices wherever practical however "change management" and "disaster recovery" are often the scariest words in corporate IT. One of the reasons for this is an IT disaster can lead to major losses and it is difficult to predict the damage. One of the major reasons is it is hard to track all assets in a datacenter and every asset may interact with another asset.

If we try to quantify IT complexity we will begin to understand this struggle. For every asset added to an IT system it may have to interact with all the other assets. As an IT system or corporate network grows over time it grows much faster. The interaction between assets can be modelled with the handshake problem: In a room with n people how many ways can people shake hands (and how much hand sanitizer do you need). Every time a new person enters the room he can shake hands with every person already in the room. It turns out that the number of handshakes possible is $$\frac{n\left(n-1\right) }{2}$$ or $$1+2+3+4+\ldots+n-1$$. What this means is if there are 10 IT assets and you add an 11th complexity increases by 10, once you add another it goes up by 11 more interactions.

When Carl Friedrich Gauss was a child his teacher as a punishment made all the kids add all the integers between 1 and 100. He was done in 5 minutes because he figured out that same pattern. Many companies have over 100 IT assets and (just like how he answered the same question) there are 5050 possible interactions between the assets. So the next time you get frustrated with your IT staff remember that every new piece of software, server, or any asset adds complexity very quickly and it is not their fault. If you are interested in managing your complex IT systems with less headache and automating your IT infrastructure; we will help you deal with growing complexity of IT systems through automation.