What Is Technical Debt and How Is It Impacting Your Organisation?

Technical debt refers to the inefficiencies and waste that arise when IT resources no longer meet an organisation’s needs. It can encompass everything from code and applications to physical hardware. Perhaps the IT asset no longer works well, has become inefficient, is using too much energy, is underutilised or doesn’t integrate with your newer IT resources.

Technical debt can have a range of negative consequences for your business—affecting your costs, operational efficiency, employee morale and even your environmental impact. Some estimates suggest that engineers spend 33% of their time dealing with it.

It’s critical for IT leaders to understand where technical debt comes from, how they can reduce it and, ultimately, how to leverage technology for sustainable growth and innovation.

What causes technical debt?

Technical debt inevitably happens to every organisation. The fast pace of change in IT means that today’s cutting-edge technologies can quickly become obsolete and create a drag on your organisation’s resources.

There are a host of reasons why tech debt piles up:

• Inadequate planning or design, which can result in suboptimal system architecture
• Limited resources, budget constraints, time pressures, or lack of the right skillsets that results in cutting corners
• Focusing on immediate business goals at the expense of long-term stability and scalability
• Legacy systems that require more maintenance or are difficult to integrate with newer technology
• Rapidly changing technology that makes it difficult to keep up with the latest innovations

Your priorities may have changed from year to year, or you may not have been clear on what you were trying to solve for when you made a purchase. The equipment you acquire could also turn out to be too big or too small for your needs. And in some organisations, too many decision-makers are involved with IT purchases, with no centralised strategy in place.

The consequences of technical debt

Whatever the reason for the technical debt, it can burden your business and hinder your success:

• Increased maintenance costs: Resolving technical debt requires time, effort and resources, which can drive up operational costs.
• Reduced productivity: Technical debt can slow down development processes and make it harder to implement new features or improvements.
• Lower system reliability and performance: Technical debt can result in more frequent system failures, security vulnerabilities and performance issues,
• Hindered innovation: Technical debt can make it difficult for organisations to adopt new technologies or implement innovative solutions, limiting their ability to compete in the market.
• Increased risk: Unresolved technical debt can expose organisations to higher risks, such as security breaches or compliance violations.

Technical debt and sustainability

Once you have visibility into your technical debt and have identified issues like unnecessary servers or applications, excessive data storage or inefficient code, you can begin to explore options for reducing that debt.

Sometimes the most sustainable choice is to keep using equipment that’s still working for you. If it’s still fit for purpose, it’s not technical debt.

If you’re refreshing IT assets, where you put your infrastructure—for example, in your private data centre, in the public cloud or in a colocation facility—can have a potential effect on its environmental and efficiency impact. You might ask:

• Can this workload or application be put in the cloud, and would cloud deliver better efficiencies?
• If cloud isn’t an option, does this asset need to be cloud adjacent?
• Would it be beneficial to move it into a colocation data centre with higher environmental standards (a sustainability-focused data centre provider like Equinix can make a big difference) 

Is your IT portfolio fit for purpose?

Companies are now seeing the advantages of digital infrastructure—greater agility, easier scaling and reduced environmental impact, to name a few. But what’s right for your business—and any specific asset or workload in your IT estate—will be very specific to you and your current resources and needs.

That’s where Equinix can help. Every day, Equinix customers are learning what they can achieve with Equinix, They’re lowering latency, increasing cost-efficiency and future-proofing their operations. Learn how high-performance data centres could help you could do the same.