Everyone will tell you that cloud migration is easy. You just point and click – and everything moves seamlessly to the cloud. And in an ideal world, that’s exactly how it would be. But they’re forgetting to mention one thing: technical debt.
All organisations will have some technical debt lurking in the depths of their infrastructure, just waiting to catch out the unwary.
But What is Technical Debt & What’s It Going To Cost You?
To put it simply, technical debt can be anything that has been postponed or ignored that should have been sorted out months or even years ago. It usually occurs when speed is prioritised over thoroughness, through tight budgets or just through lack of technical understanding.
In Application Development technical debt is clearly understood and Agile development/DevOps methodologies have been addressing it for years. But technical debt is not just lurking in your custom applications and code bases. It can be buried deep in your entire application estate.
Some examples of technical debt that can catch you out when you start a cloud migration project include:
- Old applications you’re not sure if anyone still uses.
- Applications where the business or technical champions left years ago with minimal or no handover.
- Hidden hardcoded integrations between applications that no one is aware of.
- Outdated applications that can only run on old operating systems or physical environments.
- Applications where there’s no support and no security upgrades, perhaps the Vendors no longer even exist.
- Applications that to all intents and purposes appear obsolete, until you try a soft decommission and the CFO calls up to ask where their important data has gone.
These are just a few examples of the kinds of things you might find, but the truth of it is that there is an awful lot of technical debt hiding in most organisations. And if you don’t hunt it down it’s going to jump up and bite you when you migrate.
Signs & Symptoms Of Technical Debt
The signs and symptoms of technical debt can vary as much as the technical debt itself. You might find yourself wondering why your UAT is taking so long or why things keep breaking when you migrate them. You might find that you keep missing connections to other applications. If you are going through multiple deploy/test interactions then you are likely struggling with technical debt. If you are finding it hard to identify and map out an Application architecture or usage then again it’s likely to be technical debt. These challenges all add up to significant extra time and cost on the migration project.
The True Cost Of Technical Debt
But be careful not to attribute it to the Cloud solution or Project team. The technical debt has always been there – and it’s been costing you in efficiency and agility all along. You can continue to ignore it, postpone your migration and bury your head back in the sand – but it will cost you in the long run.
It might seem like there’s a high cost involved in fixing this technical debt, but that’s only because it’s been allowed to build up in the first place. Fixing technical debt as it crops up isn’t costly – but fixing 5 or 10 years of technical debt will be.
Cloud is all about efficiency. It’s about staying current as technology progresses and keeping your company agile so you can better respond to opportunities, threats and keeping up with the competition. So while fixing your technical debt might seem expensive, it will pay off in the long run – and the cost of not fixing it will be far greater.