The priority given to information technology operations and the culture of the staff that supports it is often quite different when comparing companies which earn a majority of their income from the Internet and those that don’t. Here is what I have tended to notice.
From the day of their creation, web companies rely on IT as a key foundation to their business, usually with limited budgets. The IT employees tend to have range of skills and are more likely to embrace open source tools from the beginning, not always by choice, but by necessity. The external customer facing applications are usually internally developed and as a result internally created tools for monitoring and graphing is often the norm. Risks are taken to speed the deployment of new features and reduce costs.
In the more traditional enterprises, the approach is very different. The environments are more static and the applications are often packages developed by external parties to automate well known business processes. Maintenance is therefore done my vendors who promise stability. As a result, the IT operations staff tends to spend more time managing vendors and their contractors. This reduces the IT department’s scope of influence, their tolerance to risk and the range of technologies to which they have hands on exposure while simultaneously increasing their tendency to have more specialized skills.
These are two very different cultures. As web companies grow and the tolerance for lost service, planned or unscheduled, decreases, the need for a blended mindset increases. The need for subsystems to function independently of one another also increases in order to reduce the risk of cascading or bottleneck types of failures. The organizational challenge of deciding what the cultural blend should be still remains. Not just overall, but also on a per-application and physical subsystem level and should be an ingredient in defining risk tolerance profiles especially when considering disaster recovery strategies.
