Bimodal IT

Bimodal IT

Rock solid and high available vs. fast and agile

IT is the main business enabler! Without the IT, the business is almost unable to fulfil their business, which means they will not earn money, so from the business perspective IT has to be available all of the time, but the cost of the IT services need to be lower as the outcome of the business… so every single IT service provider need to justify their efforts to run their Services. To being able to run a Service in High availability the service provider needs to properly design these services and they need a certain Infrastructure and well-designed processes to run these IT services… A highly available IT-Services reaches easily hundreds or thousands of assets which need to interact with each other. To successfully maintain such a big infrastructure you need some policys and processes, for example an Change Management or an Asset and Configuration Management… these additional “circumstances” around your IT service leads to the fact, that changes cannot be applied in a fast way… everything has to run through the official processes and so on, but this is absolutely necessary to secure a high available IT service, unplanned changes easaliy lead into a downtime of a service, so that is the reason why the customers need to accept these processes around the IT services.

Some on the one hand side, the business cannot fulfil their business without the IT, on the other hand, the business doesn’t like these processes, policies and procedures around the IT services, because they slow down the IT in total. The business demands a fast-acting agile IT, who can ract to the needs of the business in a nutshell.

The bimodale IT is one approach to address this problem.

The bimodale IT introduces 2 “modes” of running your IT Services or IT Infrastructure:

1.       Mode 1: stable / rock solid / high available / Traditional Mode
2.       Mode 2: fast / agile / experimental / improved Mode / next Gen IT

So to compare this with a real world example, mode 1 is your heavy cruiser, with the huge machines and the huge amount of horse power and the luxury cabins to host all of your “passengers”…

Mode 2 is your light speedy landing boat, which is only there to perform a small specific task, for example transporting your “passengers” to an island, meanwhile the heavy cruiser is waiting 10 km away from the island… It is almost impossible to land on that islands with this heavy crusier ship, but these light speedy landing boats can easily reach the island and drop off your “passengers” in a fast and easy way…. But on the other hand these speedy landing boats are way to small to carry all of the passengers of the big cruiser.

Having two kind of different acting IT modes introduces new possibilities for the Business. Especially a Cloud IT Infrastructure offers the possebility to introduce a Mode 2 IT.