Uncovering Cloud-Powered Tech Debt Mitigation With Insight and AWS
Written by Ryan SzporerWriter
Experts agree — though it is nearly impossible to eliminate tech debt, it is possible to manage it. Organizations must have tech debt mitigation processes and strategies in place to address the debt and reduce the likelihood of it accumulating in the future.
Mitigating tech debt successfully is mission-critical to achieving business transformation goals. Leaders should aim to identify where their tech debt lies, prioritize its reduction according to business needs and establish a mitigation strategy to minimize tech debt.
The first step to mitigating tech debt is identifying where your debt is hiding. You can start this process by conducting a high-level audit of current applications and workloads, taking note of what is performing well and what can be performing better. Often, applications and workloads that are consistently underperforming can be concealing technical debt.
Once the tech debt has been identified, leaders should prioritize which debt to tackle first. Understanding tech debt’s total impact on the business (across customer experience, productivity, loss of revenue and more) will help pinpoint which area of the business is most affected by the debt and what kind of tech debt has accumulated.
After prioritizing what debt area to tackle first, begin crafting a tech debt mitigation strategy unique to your organization.
Though it’s unlikely to rid tech debt from your business forever, having the right processes in place helps minimize its occurrence. Leveraging automation and agile methodology can help reduce the incidence of technical debt in your business.
Automating processes (across the building, testing, deploying and monitoring phases), modernizing your application environment and staying current with the latest security and regulatory compliance requirements will lower the likelihood of tech debt accumulation.
Leaning on continuous improvement agile methodology can help reduce time-to-value for customers and ease the aggregation of debt. Proactively approaching software development and deployment from an agile standpoint helps to avoid initial tech debt and provides a framework within which to address and break the cycle of tech debt in your business.
Organizations can take steps to manage their tech debt by making it visible, prioritizing it by risk, assessing its business impact and integrating regular remediation methods across the business.
Automation, modernization and agile practices have a significant impact on reducing the aggregation of tech debt for businesses. This is why many organizations turn to cloud migration to ease their tech debt mitigation journey. To assess if the move is right for you, you must evaluate if the cloud benefits align with your desired business outcomes.
Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) like AWS offer standardized, well-supported services to automate and modernize your business to mitigate tech debt. Moving business operations to the cloud can facilitate security and regulatory compliance in an updated environment, helping organizations avoid tech debt build-up.
Furthermore, AWS has been shown to reduce costs on licensing entitlements by 36% on average. Additional efficiencies when migrating to AWS from an on-premises setup come in the form of savings related to infrastructure (up to 47%), lower time to market for new features (43%) and less security-related incidents (45%), per The Hackett Group.
The lower costs help enable organizations to increase their business agility and innovate faster, which tech debt hinders by definition. In the case of the latter, The Hackett Group also saw a 29% increase in staff focus on innovation.
At Insight, we help clients tackle your loftiest business challenges. We recently expanded our partnership with the market cloud lead in AWS into Canada, transforming Insight into a multicloud powerhouse. We’ll review your application and workload portfolios and assess how your IT stack can best address your business needs.
With a free Optimization and Licensing Assessment (OLA), we’ll analyze your current environment, identify workloads to optimize, collect and analyze the data, and review the results with you to plan out your next steps. Additional Insight offerings in partnership with AWS include FinOps and managed services.
Insight and AWS can help you get there.
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