by Angela Guess
Jeff Alexander recently wrote in Information Management, “There is a lot of talk these days from major IT research firms about how today’s enterprise CIOs need to embrace bimodal IT. One of the key ideas behind this bimodal IT concept is that CIOs need to build and support two different sets of IT infrastructure, one that is used for existing application environments (Mode 1) and one used for the rapid development and launch of lightweight, digital and mobile services (Mode 2). These research firms go on to say that while traditional IT infrastructure should be modernized for Mode 1, where it will ‘run the business’ using traditional commercial legacy software and hardware, CIOs should also build another set of infrastructure that uses open source software and commodity hardware to provide the DevOps team with the ‘startup’ agility they need to develop and launch new applications quickly.”
Alexander goes on, “Unfortunately, this dual infrastructure approach rests on several false premises. The first is that startup DevOps teams are all using open source software, and that this is what enables agile application development. The reality is far different. Most startup DevOps teams use a lot of paid software and services out of necessity because they don’t have the time or resources to customize and tie together a bunch of open source applications to meet their IT infrastructure needs. If they did spend the time building this infrastructure themselves they would never get their businesses off the ground. Drawing on scores of on staff engineers and deep pockets, only the biggest of the big tech companies are building IT infrastructures that are based on open source and their own custom-built software.”
He adds, “Additionally, the complexity of having to manage two completely separate environments also becomes an inhibitor to growth because data governance, security and protection will now have separate technologies, methodologies and procedures. This could result in issues with compliance (DR for example) as well as potentially introducing vulnerabilities into the data center that could result in data breaches and other security risks.”
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