The Apple of your Architecture.

The fruit you love is part of humanity’s evolving food architecture. Apples originate from crab-apple forests that grew in the Tian Shan mountains (Kazakhstan) around 750,000 years ago and were spread throughout the world by way of the Silk Road trading routes.

Apple trees are extreme heterozygotes – bees cross-pollinate apple trees from different varieties and so the resulting seed produces fruit that is different from that of the host. This means that when you plant an apple seed, the tree that grows will not bear the same fruit.

To grow new types of the same apples, grafts or clones (scions) of existing trees are made on new rootstock, in fact one of the worlds most popular apples, the red delicious can be traced back to a single mutant tree that grew in new jersey back in 1914. That cultivar has been cloned many times since to make the apples we love.

HelloRisk.net screenshot describing the Sweetness architectural
attribute and the risk of malate making the apples sour.

When the first English colonists arrived in the US they found that many of the European cultivars did not grow well in the US climate. Farmers experimented with different plants and grafts and apple trees were cross bred for their different genetic properties. Different varietals were grown for their hardiness, sweetness or their ability to remain crisp over time.

“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.”

— Carl Sagan.

We need to take the concepts of refining apples to heart with our Enterprise Security Architecture #ESA. We need to build on the strengths of our existing architecture and graft new enhancements along the way.

We want to keep the desirable traits while removing those that are not – it’s a balance to minimise the bad elements and emphasise the good elements in our Enterprise Security Orchard.