Microsoft may not be directly responsible for the CrowdStrike outage, but it does show how much the world relies on Windows and Microsoft’s infrastructure. And how dangerous that can be.

The tech world is trending toward consolidation, with buyers and users choosing one or a few major options. YouTube for video, Amazon for shopping, Google for search, and so on. In those cases, effective monopoly makes it easy to find what you’re looking for — it’s all in one place — but in the case of infrastructure, this kind of centralization is a burden, as we saw in the recent Crowdstrike outage, where a single botched software update crashed millions of infrastructure-critical computers around the world. Shouldn’t businesses — and governments — be using more reliable, less centralized software?

“It’s significantly easier to manage, monitor, and operate an organization that uses a standardized set of tools,” cybersecurity expert and white-hat hacker Andrew Plato told Lifewire via email. “Standardization is a key component, not just for efficiency, but for security. Uniform, consistent environments are easier to secure because it becomes easier to identify things that are out of place.”

Security is boring, and not just to you and me. A large company is no more likely to spend time and money on security than anyone else, which is why we keep hearing about massive privacy breaches at companies whose job it is to protect user data. Security is often just a checkbox on a compliance form, so these companies end up buying the most obvious off-the-shelf solution just so they can check that box.