That’s the extreme end of technical debt—software archaeology rather than software engineering. Day-to-day technical debt is perhaps better thought of as a drag on business, code that doesn’t quite fit the current state of a business process, requiring manual workarounds that slow things down but allow the applications to keep running. There’s associated compounding risk as applications, operating systems, storage, and networks drift away from security baselines, dropping out of support, unpatched because any updates could stop the business from operating.
Migrating to the cloud can help, but too often it’s a matter of simply replicating a physical infrastructure in virtual machines on an IaaS platform. Yes, hyperscale cloud PaaS features could solve problems, as well as using automated updates and upgrades to deploy the latest features and keep applications more secure.
Automating cloud migrations
Microsoft has offered several generations of tools to migrate applications to the cloud, mostly focused on finding the right size Azure virtual machines and the right virtual network appliances and topography, as well as importing data into cloud storage. Microsoft has provided useful ways to move applications to the cloud, but the company hasn’t helped you modernize code or infrastructure. Enterprises are just replicating technical debt in Azure instead of on their own servers.
