Technical Debt: Your Hidden DevOps Nightmare - Part 1
January 16, 2019

Brandon Carroll
TEKsystems Global Services

Technical debt is a phrase that you may have heard once or twice before. For those who haven't, it's typically defined as what results when legacy platforms or highly integrated and dependent systems and processes inhibit large enterprise organizations from meeting the needs of internal business stakeholders. In many cases, the core objectives that drive real, monetizable business value (e.g., customer acquisition, customer retention and new revenue opportunities) are not aligned to the esoteric IT goals of "automation" and "Agile development." This creates a fundamental disconnect between business and IT.

CICD (Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery) and DevOps are mere buzzwords that enterprises are seemingly adopting to address this issue — with mixed results at best. There's a fundamental focus in enterprise IT today on technology-driven solutions to clear technical debt and "automate things." However, enterprise IT often forgets their due diligence in working directly with the business to define the integrated solutions that'll modernize the application portfolio, drive agility and scalability, and increase release velocity — i.e., setting the table to drive out necessary features and functionality to a consumer base faster in a secure, defect-free manner.

To better align business and IT objectives, enterprise organizations should focus on the core "problems" that individual business units face today in driving out real consumer value. Until the roadblocks and inhibitors — and, ultimately, the resultant technical debt — are removed from the equation, large enterprise organizations will continue struggling to succeed in real transformation initiatives.

To better define a potential solution, organizations should first define the "problems" across the affected business units.

The Business Problem

Businesses need to stay competitive by constantly driving new revenue opportunities and improving the customer experience. Delivering new features, functionality and an enhanced user experience is critical for any consumer-facing application. These goals are highly dependent on speed to market, requiring more frequent software releases. This becomes an issue when cumbersome legacy systems and monolithic processes can't deliver necessary technical solutions as quickly as the business demands, negatively affecting the company's ability to compete or introduce new products and solutions into the marketplace.

The Development Problem

Large, monolithic applications are no longer feasible to support the ever-changing market demands of mobility and new feature or functionality delivery. Product and development teams must respond to business requests faster with high-quality deployments. Yet IT organizations are dealing with the underlying dependencies and voluminous integration points with legacy data sets and platforms.

The result? A nightmare scenario where IT becomes the bottleneck to business and development goals. Traditional ways of working on the IT side don't align with the speed-to-market objectives development teams need to meet. While software releases may be "small" as organizations become more agile, they are fraught with risk as QA and security are either forsaken or delay the release of new functionality to consumers that the business demands.

The IT Problem

Enterprise IT organizations are increasingly realizing that they must deliver secure infrastructure at a cadence that meets business and development needs. The inherent technical debt associated with highly dependent, integrated legacy platforms, siloed management structures and antiquated provisioning processes stands in the way of meeting core business objectives.

When underlying platforms and infrastructure have so many dependencies and integration points, configuration management becomes all but impossible in lower-level environments and, ultimately, production environments. This leads to delayed releases and deployments because, like security and QA, they have become production release blockers.

As most enterprise organizations have separate QA and security groups not aligned to the business, development and IT goals, "faster" is the enemy of quality and security, which delays or inhibits the overall business goals.

Read Technical Debt: Your Hidden DevOps Nightmare - Part 2, offering a plan to align business goals with IT solutions.

Brandon Carroll is Director, Transformation, DevOps and Cloud Services, for TEKsystems Global Services
Share this

Industry News

May 05, 2025

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, and Synadia announced that the NATS project will continue to thrive in the cloud native open source ecosystem of the CNCF with Synadia’s continued support and involvement.

May 05, 2025

RapDev announced the launch of Arlo, an AI Agent for ServiceNow designed to transform how enterprises manage operational workflows, risk, and service delivery.

May 01, 2025

Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd.(link is external) announced that its Quantum Firewall Software R82 — the latest version of Check Point’s core network security software delivering advanced threat prevention and scalable policy management — has received Common Criteria EAL4+ certification, further reinforcing its position as a trusted security foundation for critical infrastructure, government, and defense organizations worldwide.

May 01, 2025

Postman announced full support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), helping users build better AI Agents, faster.

May 01, 2025

Opsera announced new Advanced Security Dashboard capabilities available as an extension of Opsera's Unified Insights for GitHub Copilot.

May 01, 2025

Lineaje launched new capabilities including Lineaje agentic AI-powered self-healing agents that autonomously secure open-source software, source code and containers, Gold Open Source Packages and Gold Open Source Images that enable organizations to source trusted, pre-fixed open-source software, and a software crawling and analysis engine, SCA360, that discovers and contextualizes risks at all software development stages.

April 30, 2025

Lenses.io announced the release of Lenses 6.0, enabling organizations to modernize applications and systems with real-time data as AI adoption accelerates.

April 30, 2025

Sonata Software has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) DevOps Competency status.

April 29, 2025

vFunction® announced significant platform advancements that reduce complexity across the architectural spectrum and target the growing disconnect between development speed and architectural integrity.

April 29, 2025

Sonatype® introduced major enhancements to Repository Firewall that expand proactive malware protection across the enterprise — from developer workstations to the network edge.

April 29, 2025

Aqua Security introduced Secure AI, full lifecycle security from code to cloud to prompt.

April 29, 2025

Salt Security announced the launch of the Salt Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server, giving enterprise teams a novel access point of interaction with their API infrastructure, leveraging natural language and artificial intelligence (AI).

April 28, 2025

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, announced the graduation of in-toto, a software supply chain security framework developed at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering.

April 28, 2025

SnapLogic announced the launch of its next-generation API management (APIM) solution, helping organizations accelerate their journey to a composable and agentic enterprise.