Why Software Migration Is More Expensive When You Delay It

Delaying software migration may seem reasonable at first sight: the system keeps working, and teams are familiar with it, while modernization introduces potential costs and risks. However, the longer businesses postpone migration, the more expenses and disruption they may inflict. Up to 80% of the U.S. companies’ IT budgets go to maintaining existing technologies, leaving only 20% for innovation. But the biggest issue is cost accumulation: with every year, maintenance becomes more expensive, while the cost of change also rises.

The software migration process has numerous dimensions, including compliance, security risks, performance, and infrastructure constraints. However, the two fundamental factors have the most direct impact on long-term migration cost: technical debt and business processes. They determine migration expenses by affecting scope, risk, and delivery speed, and also demonstrate whether software migration is a controlled investment or firefighting.

The article closely explores technical debt and business process inertia as the powerful cost drivers in delayed software migration. We analyze their reasons, consequences, and impacts to understand when they turn into an expensive organizational challenge and how to fight them for efficient modernization.

Technical Debt: What It Really Is and How It Appears

To understand what is a migration and why it can be delayed, let’s examine the concept of technical debt. 

A technical occurrence in its essence, technical debt is usually not an engineering fault. It is rather a sequence of short-term decisions that were justified at a specific time. As Igor Omelianchuk explains, technical debt appears “when teams choose speed over structure.” Skipped refactoring, temporary fixes, or solution shortcuts are often started as reasonable ways to achieve faster results under pressure. However, they compound silently, gradually turning into issues.

Andrew Lychuk compares: “It's like a financial debt. The loan is useful at some point, but over time, it accumulates interest. The real problem isn’t a technical debt, but the cost of ignoring the interest payments.”

What happens if you continue to neglect compiling technical debt?

Temporary solutions turn into permanent ones, and technical debt becomes structural. As long as the shortcuts continue to work just “good enough,” nobody changes anything, while the new features are hindered by the compromises made earlier. The shortcuts accumulate, code paths multiply, and no engineer has a holistic understanding of the entire system. 

What’s particularly dangerous about this degradation is that the system doesn’t produce any warnings. It just slows down, magnifying the feature release times and impeding your progress. What you can do to identify the early signs of decay is pay attention to the following metrics:

● Cycle time increases● Debugging and investigation take more than coding● Regression defects grow with each release● Change failure rate rises even for minor upgrades● Incident resolution (MTTR) takes longer● Deployments become more brittle● Duplicate logic appears across modules and services● Cyclomatic complexity and dependency depth grow● Test execution time increases while test coverage doesn’t change

The Compound Effect: How Technical Debt Grows and Slows Development

A continual accumulation of quick fixes leads to growing complexity and a lack of comprehensive vision. The development process is guided by the fear of refactoring rather than a strategic consideration, and teams seek workarounds instead of real solutions. This looks more like “fixing a cracked foundation by painting the walls,” as Igor Omelianchuk aptly puts it. 

Cosmetic improvements without addressing underlying problems inevitably impact the development process, generating and magnifying hidden costs. Velocity decreases, refactoring is postponed, and engineers spend more time debugging than building new features. Documentation is poor or missing, while knowledge is concentrated with a few senior developers. Engaging new experts doesn’t help, since they need to understand the code base for efficient support and safe upgrades. The lack of access to historical context, however, makes this impossible. Eventually, dependence on the “tribal knowledge” creates a development bottleneck.

Andrew Lychuk comments: “The system starts depending on people instead of architecture. And that's a huge risk for business.”

This scenario, sooner or later, leads to a much more complicated migration of software. Andrew Lychuk continues: “When migration is finally performed, it’s not just moving the code but untangling years of assumptions, dependencies, and legacy decisions.” Furthermore, each year of delay increases scope, risk, and cost.

Ultimately, the compound effect makes IT migration not a strategic investment but an urgent and expensive crisis response.

When Technical Debt Becomes a Business Problem

Over time, technical debt expands from being a purely engineering concern and penetrates the organization’s culture. Outdated software is no longer just a tool, but an indispensable part of working processes and internal operations. Instead of assisting teams in their workflows, software starts dictating how these workflows are organized.

Temporary technical compromises gradually grow into generally accepted methods. Specifically, spreadsheets replace CRMs, shared folders replace systems of record, and added manual steps fill gaps left by aging software.

Why workarounds turn into workflows? 

● Existing teams resist change: they feel accustomed to existing processes, which seem to work “normally”. Employees using spreadsheets are unwilling to adopt a CRM, since “all their skills, all their processes, all their comfort zone, are locked in those spreadsheets,” exemplifies Igor Omelianchuk.● New hires don’t remedy the issue: newbies inherit old models. They are trained to follow existing routines rather than challenge them, reinforcing outdated organizational methods.

What happens next? 

● The entire relationship changes from the ground up: instead of supporting business, software forces the whole organization to adapt to its limitations. Igor Omelianchuk specifies: “Not only senior developers but also your salespeople, your accountancy, your customer support, and other departments get locked in the existing software so much that the software shapes processes fully.”● Critical decisions depend not on strategic needs but on a habit that no one wants to change.

In this situation, technology migration transforms from a technical task to an organizational transformation.

Organizational Resistance & Power Dynamics

To understand the entire scope of transformational tasks, organizations should recognize that software modernization and IT migrations interfere with people, habits, incentives, and power structures that have formed around legacy systems over many years. 

Andrew Lychuk highlights that “organizational problems are usually much more difficult to solve than technical problems.”

More than just migrating information or replacing software, you need to restructure responsibilities, KPIs, and power dynamics in the team.

Much tension emerges around senior engineering leadership. Experienced developers, who often built and supported the existing system through years of growth, have gained significant influence in the company. They have immense practical experience with the software they’ve created, and their arguments to retain the processes that “have been working for 15 years” sound reasonable to the management. 

“We often face this situation,” shares Andrew Lychuk, “when senior engineers have their own vision, and they follow it, and there is nothing you can do about it.”

What happens in reality is that once stable approaches and systems can now slow progress. Legacy knowledge and personal ownership evoke resistance to new architectures, tools, or processes. Conflicting incentives, BAU workload, key-person dependency, and governance make change expensive. Deep historical context creates a comfort zone for internal teams, often making them inefficient in modernization, since they feel safer with current routines.

“And getting out of this is a very big problem,” notes Igor Omelianchuk. “That's why an external partner can potentially be much more successful running a modernization project because the existing staff is locked in the established software and processes.”

Efficient modernization and migration projects must be viewed from the following angles: 

● technical ● organizational● management ● power dynamics 

Neglecting these factors may disrupt even the strongest technical plan.

The Safe Path: Successful Modernization Requires Technical & Organizational Change

So, technological and organizational modernization must go hand in hand. Upgrading architectures, refactoring legacy code, or migrating systems is necessary yet insufficient if done on its own. If technical change stumbles upon entrenched processes, hierarchies, and habits, progress stalls. 

Andrew Lychuk warns that these factors “lock the company within the current framework that isn’t going to change even if the higher management decides to change.”

These are the fundamental reasons making delayed modernization so expensive and risky. Technical debt accumulates quietly, while workarounds become workflows, and software sets the limits of how teams think and operate. To overcome these constraints, modernization and infrastructure migration must embrace the transformation of incentives, communication, ownership, and leadership structure. 

Thus, a successful modernization should consider:

● Reducing technical debt and architectural complexity● Redesigning business processes shaped by legacy systems● Addressing resistance rooted in comfort zones and power dynamics● Structuring leadership, responsibilities, and decision-making

Igor Omelianchuk concludes: “When you are planning a modernization project, be prepared that without organizational modernization your technical modernization will simply not work.”

Companies that approach modernization not as a code rewrite but as a comprehensive transformation of their internal culture avoid gradual degradation, as well as the costs and risks of reactive responses. Instead, they implement safe and controlled upgrades, sustainable and efficient in the long term.