Between mounting process complexities, aging systems and skills gaps, it’s becoming more difficult to focus on modernizing infrastructure to unlock potential. Here’s what our clients are grappling with and what advice we’re giving to help forge a path to better outcomes.
1. Technical debt
As infrastructures evolve and change, technical debt builds. As debt builds, maintenance costs often go up, processes slow down and performance suffers — problems that all create roadblocks to modernization and innovation. What’s more, aging systems and architectures are more difficult to secure against threat actors.
Enterprises can’t completely avoid tech debt. But it is possible to minimize the impact — through careful planning and management. Organizations should take a holistic approach that includes understanding where the tech debt can live, having a plan for prioritizing it, and getting more strategic about how decisions are made. This stops harmful technical debt from mounting and blocking the business from important change.
To address technical debt, here are three guiding points from my colleague John O’Shaughnessy, Insight Infrastructure Architect and Senior Consultant. In his blog, he says:
- Don’t compartmentalize. This happens when organizations upgrade small components of a solution, but they're not completely getting rid of any technical debt because it's not the full solution that they're upgrading. In effect, you’re most likely just squeezing some tech debt out into another area. To stamp out tech debt, you need to look at the bigger picture and take a step back to consider the full solution.
- Keep track. Every time you buy something for your IT environment, you're basically committing to a certain amount of time that you're going to leverage it. Keep a list of your systems and where they are in their lifecycle. Think of this as your tech debt roadmap: Awareness of what you have, what needs updating now and what will need updating later is one of the best ways to safeguard against running into bumps in the road with tech debt down the line.
- Consider enrolling experts. Knowing how to skillfully approach tech debt takes expertise and practice. But the reality is that some organizations simply lack the internal strategic and/or technical resources needed to effectively address tech debt. Leaning on an expert partner like Insight for tech debt mitigation not only covers those gaps but can help free up internal resources so teams can get back to focusing on innovation.
Slow down to speed up
Upcoming renewals, M&As and divestiture activity are compelling events that often push the business to modernize. Don’t rush your decision-making — make sure you’re identifying and adopting cost and resource-effective solutions to avoid more technical debt down the line.
2. The IT resource gap
Making headway on modernization means organizations need a balance between maintaining infrastructure while also pursuing forward-thinking projects. But with complex systems that require 24/7 monitoring and support, the time and resources left for modernization can be hard to come by.
Plus, ongoing operational duties can take up a hefty portion of an IT team's time and attention — creating roadblocks to innovation with limited resources available for strategic initiatives.