In today’s saturated tech market, organizations are increasingly driven by management to innovate continuously to stay competitive and disruptive. While necessary, this directive can, and unfortunately often does, lead to short-term thinking and a lack of strategic foresight that plagues technology rollout and results in shortcuts being taken.

This leads to the accumulation of “tech debt" - long-term tech defects and issues derived from IT teams prioritizing speed over quality during tech implementation. Tech debt is most commonly associated with software development but also rings true in the context of the cloud. Migration to the cloud is nothing new, of course, but the rush to escape the deficiencies of legacy systems and rationalize IT with modern SaaS applications has seen many organizations generate significant amounts of tech debt.

While working at pace may keep project timelines on track, keeping a lid on resulting tech debt becomes increasingly costly both financially and in terms of core operational efficiency as time goes on. With IT costs projected to rise by another nine percent in 2025, and with day-to-day IT operations becoming more complex to manage, organizations must be more proactive when addressing tech debt to ensure it doesn’t rear its head later down the line.

The persisting challenge of cloud migration

Cloud migration is one of the most relatable exercises of large-scale IT transformation, having been on the agendas of IT decision-makers for over a decade now. Despite this, research by Flexera found that 66 percent of IT professionals continue to call out such migrations as a key professional challenge.

Interestingly, Flexera also found that three-quarters of respondents admitted tech debt is a key roadblock to enterprise modernization, with more than a third blaming the problem on “rushed” cloud migrations during the pandemic. Tech debt is constantly accumulating and ever-present on IT balance sheets. Shortcuts may have seemed worth the trade-off “net-net” at the time of being taken but have slowly accumulated into larger, more complex issues.

Cloud migrations are one thing, but the long-term upkeep of cloud environments is another, and a process that is never truly finished. This includes the day-to-day management of regular updates, patches, and compute resource scaling, but also the longer-term ambitious transformation to integrate cloud-native data with technologies that can be scaled across the organization. Tech debt can divert resources and attention away from all this essential upkeep, so a strategy to proactively manage and address it is critical.

Rethinking approaches to tech debt

The existing orthodox thinking on managing and addressing tech debt often doesn’t cut it. It typically frames tech debt in terms of financial implications, like the cost of leaving the problem unsolved. This results in a largely reactive approach that sees tech debt addressed as and when something breaks. The creeping accumulation of tech debt means that it negatively impacts technology that’s core to operations, increasing downtime and overall costs. Addressing it proactively, and before it causes problems, should therefore be a strategic priority over the long term.

While the benefits of the cloud are clear, organizations can’t dismiss the risks stemming from a poorly configured cloud environment, such as service outages or diminished operational efficiency, which can be a direct outcome of tech debt.

Addressing such issues when they appear is leaving it far too late. The result is an unbalancing of resources, limits to flexibility, and skyrocketing cost of operational maintenance. It’s the kind of overhead that organizations particularly can’t afford in light of new technologies driving up overall cloud costs.

With each new technology integrated and scaled internally, the pain of accumulated tech debt will only grow. This threatens a slowdown of transformation initiatives and, worst case scenario, a total breakdown in operational efficiency. To change course, organizations must take a holistic approach to digital transformation that uses enterprise architecture (EA) to map everything from applications to infrastructure. This method guides the development of cloud environments and ensures that transformation aligns with business strategy and priorities.

Harnessing EA for technology transformation can and should extend to strategies for paying down tech debt. A systemic and more proactive approach is possible and far superior to reactive treatment.

Visibility of the IT estate as a whole that EA grants, including in the context of wider business processes and objectives, equips IT teams with a “digital blueprint” of their organization. This can be used to identify how the IT estate is functioning in the context of goals and to formulate strategies to address tech debt more easily. EA naturally enables a more proactive approach to managing tech debt through transformation planning that’s bolstered by simulation capabilities and the ability to place IT assets in the context of wider business metrics like internal skills and resources. A holistic view helps guide initial cloud migration but, importantly, also supports long-term maintenance and planning for a cloud environment.

In conclusion, organizations are faced with a stark choice in 2025. Let tech debt run riot to the long-term detriment of cloud architecture or keep a lid on it to drive effective transformation. The latter is the only sustainable way forward, especially when supported by a unified and comprehensive view of IT and business processes.