BREAKING FREE OF THE
“IF IT AIN’T BROKE” IT MODEL
By Ben Grinnell
BREAKING FREE OF THE “IF IT AIN’T THE STATE OF THE INDUSTRY AND
BROKE” IT MODEL HOW IT GOT THERE
When Netflix moved to the cloud, it Innovation and constant improvement
released a “chaos monkey” to wreak havoc are essential to the long-term success
on its system. The chaos monkey is a script of enterprise IT. Over the last couple of
meant to mimic the behaviour of “a wild decades, however, many leaders decided
monkey with a weapon in your data centre that IT was not a core capability they
(or cloud region) to randomly shoot down wanted to worry about. They outsourced
instances and chew through cables.” 1 The it, optimising for cost and reliability. That
idea was to cause intentional failures in decision built up an entire industry and
a controlled environment where Netflix’s led many cost-focused organisations to
experts could comfortably monitor and delay modernising their requirements. IT