Organizations, especially those that operate in highly regulated industries, often struggle with maintain legacy systems and the technical debt they bring with them.
Most businesses have embraced digitization and legacy modernization both to deliver better user experiences and to reduce the IT costs over the long term. However, organizations that operate in highly regulated industries—including government agencies, banks, and other financial institutions—continue to rely on legacy systems for business-critical operations. As a result, they are struggling to maintain these systems and end up devoting significant resources to paying interest on technical debt instead of innovation, optimization, and the creation of new features.
Often, they hang onto legacy systems and the technical debt that comes with it due to inertia and code-dependency. If a business’s legacy code is getting the job done, their thinking goes, why change it? For other enterprises, it comes down to effort and expenses. They believe that updating legacy systems will be a long journey, and many are reluctant to devote a significant portion of their budget to a thorough remodel.
However, they are probably not considering the total cost of involved in maintaining legacy systems and dealing with the real-word costs of technical debt. To understand the scope of the problem, Unqork commissioned Morning Consult to survey 500 business and technology leaders across financial services, insurance, healthcare, and the public sector. Nearly 80% of respondents say technical debt caused cancellation of business critical projects and organizational paralysis, delayed innovation, and increased costs. And more than nine in 10 (92%) of respondents said their organizations struggle with some form of technical debt, often with serious consequences.
IT organizations around the world are burdened by an estimated $1.52 trillion in technical debt, according to reporting in the Wall Street Journal.
IT organizations around the world are burdened by an estimated $1.52 trillion in technical debt, according to reporting in the Wall Street Journal. No wonder they have so few resources to devote to business agility and innovation. And a 2019 study conducted by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that ten of the federal government’s legacy systems cost about $337 million annually to operate and maintain.
How much technical debt are you carrying?
You can break down the costs of maintaining legacy systems and infrastructure into two broad categories: Surface costs and hidden costs. Surface costs are straightforward and quantitative, including tech expenses you’d expect to see on a bill at the end of each cycle—or the amount of time you spend on debugging, etcode reviews, etc. Hidden costs are qualitative expenses that can be observed rather than counted, such as a dip in performance, productivity of developers and engineers, deployment delays that lead to lost ROI, and more.
The biggest surface cost related to legacy systems is, of course, maintenance and refactoring. Again, this is where up to 75% of your tech budget can go if you’re still using legacy code. And wherever there is legacy maintenance, technical debt—the costs associated with implementing stop-gap technical solutions—is sure to follow. As you continue to pile code onto a system that already isn’t working, the bugs, glitches, and code reviews will compound until you’re spending all your time and money trying to address the problem.
Measuring the cost of technical debt may not be as obvious as financial debt. But given the size of the problem, it is worth taking time to understand how it is affecting your organization.
According to one analysis of technical debt at 160 organizations, the average application consisting of 300,000 lines of code came with a hefty price tag of $1,083,000 worth of technical debt—that’s $3.61 per line of code! The sheer size of technical debt is why it’s nearly impossible to tackle it efficiently without completely halting your projects. Along with technical debt, other surface costs include:
- Hiring tech talent: As your legacy system gets older, it will become harder and harder to find developers who know how to work with it. If you do find the right talent, you may need to offer extra compensation to convince them to stay.
- Special licensing requirements: In some cases, you’ll still have to pay specialized licensing fees even if the legacy system is discontinued.
- Security breaches: Legacy systems are inherently more buggy than modern systems, leaving you vulnerable to security attacks. A high-profile security breach in 2017 was partly caused by a legacy code that had been around since the 1970s. All in all, the breach cost the credit reporting agency around $1.3 billion.
When it comes to hidden costs, you might not be able to put a monetary price on them. However, you will certainly be able to feel their impact on your enterprise. Here are a few of the most common hidden costs when it comes to legacy maintenance:
- Poor customer service: If your customers have to deal with a buggy legacy system that constantly crashes, they’re likely to take their business elsewhere
- Employee burnout: Your developers joined your team to solve intriguing tech challenges, not to chip away at legacy maintenance all day. Plus, maintaining legacy systems puts considerable strain on your tech team and hinders their productivity. These factors and more can increase employee burnout and dissatisfaction, which in turn increases turnover.
- The cost of opportunity: When you’re drowning in technical debt from legacy maintenance, you don’t have the time or money to innovate. Your competitors can, and will, use this opportunity to pass you by.
Build smarter, spend less
To keep your enterprise from breaking the bank, you have to break away from code entirely. The Unqork Entperise App Cloud enables you to achieve this, because it eliminates all coding, even for complex, sophisticated software development. And of course no code equals no legacy code.
By using Unqork to break down monolithic systems into microservices, Unqork makes it faster, easier, and more cost-effective to transition away from legacy systems and pivot towards a code-free ecosystem that minimizes or eliminates technical debt. This will help your team be three times more productive, get products to market three times faster, and spend less time constantly chasing and squashing bugs. It also enables you to overcome design debt, which is the sum of all the imperfections of the user experience and design processes that accumulate over time.
Unqork can also help you reduce your total cost of ownership by three times just by reducing ongoing legacy maintenance costs. And if you can’t do away with your legacy systems in one fell swoop, that’s okay too! With Unqork, you can configure your legacy systems into your modern web application without writing code. That means no editable codebases to maintain, which effectively removes legacy code, expedites slow development cycles, and helps you make a bigger dent in your technical debt.
After connecting your modern architecture to your legacy systems, you can extend them and scale up as needed with no hassle. This puts you in a better position to eventually replace your old legacy code and streamline your processes without missing a beat. With the power of Unqork’s platform, you can remove legacy systems and maintenance from your enterprise entirely to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and push your enterprise past the competition.
To learn more about Unqork, take a self-guided tour of our platform. You can also sign up for the Unqork newsletter or schedule a personalized demonstration with one of our in-house experts today.
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