The silver lining of COVID-19 was it acting as the much-needed catapult for businesses’ digital plans. Specifically, it gave IT teams the momentum needed in migrating to the cloud.

However, the unfortunate reality that’s become clear in 2021 is that when it comes to the cloud, this pace has been less of a cloud’s silver lining – and more of a dark shadow beneath.

 


“Through 2022, coping with technical debt accumulated during the pandemic will shadow 50% of CIOs, causing financial stress and inertial drag on IT agility”.


 

At CCL, we’re seeing rushed and simplified cloud migrations creating and accumulating (an unchecked) weight inside Kiwi businesses. This “weight” that holds back businesses from gaining resilience and digital momentum is known as technical debt.

Managing Technical Debt

It’s a common phrase in the world of IT. Put plainly, technical debt is the outcome of businesses taking IT short-cuts and then not managing the implications. The pandemic created a perfect storm for this.

The implications?

  • Unnecessary costs: Most rushed migrations to the cloud result in businesses paying too much for features and infrastructure they don’t need. The irony? Cloud has long been hailed as the solution to avoiding these kinds of problems!
  • Barriers to scale: Managing legacy software, poor quality/unmaintained systems and accumulating costs all stand in the way of businesses reliant on their Cloud capabilities to grow and adapt to change in times of need. 
  • Security holes: Too many businesses operate on an assumption that updating their systems and keeping everything “in the cloud” means they’re as secure as they need to be. Cybercrimes are on the rise in NZ, and half of Kiwi businesses acknowledge that their business is not prepared yet for an attack.
  • IT inertia: Implementing new digital solutions based on cloud data or infrastructure can be held up if your cloud setup is not fit for purpose. Equally, with more pressure on IT teams to “play catch up” – this takes time and resource away from them being able to develop new solutions.
  • Roadmap disruption. The accumulation of technical debt means digital investments get deterred from the work that will have the best outcome for customers or employees. Instead, spend continues to be directed “backward” – fixing problems.

 


In 2022, enterprises focused on digital resiliency will adapt to disruption and extend services to respond to new conditions 50% faster than ones fixated on restoring existing business/IT resiliency levels.


 

The Road Ahead

There is an opportunity ahead for organisations that quickly manage technical debt from cloud migrations. Here’s how progressive Kiwi businesses are getting started:

  1. Understand how responsive to change your business needs to be moving forward – and what future ambitions your team have for new cloud-based solutions. Alongside your digital roadmap, there needs to be a plan to identify, mitigate and avoid technical debt that could hamstring these initiatives.
  1. Ensure the resource invested in mitigating technical debt is used effectively by having a cloud expert conduct a health check on your set-up – and work with you to implement the plan to mitigate debt early (and quickly).

Why should managing cloud migration technical debt be a priority in 2021?

With the digital momentum gained in 2020, new capacity is available in digital roadmaps to experiment and implement new technologies this year. With Cloud migrations not yet in the rearview mirror – debt can be mitigated quickly – and have less of an impact down the line.

Leave behind limitations with a specialist implementation and health check of Azure’s hybrid cloud.