The four types of technical debt and how to tackle them
January 6, 2026 / Drew Gregory
Short on time? Read the key takeaways:
- Technical debt accumulates when you defer maintenance and modernization, causing technology stagnation and security gaps.
- Four types of technical debt can stall your organization’s progress: architecture debt, process debt, security debt and experience debt.
- Assessing your technical debt is the start of building a roadmap for how to tackle it so you can modernize more of your applications.
- Accelerate your modernization efforts by harnessing generative and agentic AI tools.
You know that aging application that keeps your team up at night? The one running on outdated infrastructure, patched together with workarounds? That's technical debt, and it's costing more than you think.
Technical debt accumulates when organizations defer operational costs, modernization investments and critical maintenance of their technology stack and overall architecture. Organizations face tough choices about which initiatives to fund first. The projects you defer today become tomorrow's technical debt, accumulating interest just like financial obligations. Budget constraints or competing priorities drive these deferrals, but the consequences compound: technology stagnates, architectures age and security gaps widen.
These issues trickle down, making it more challenging to modernize applications for advanced infrastructure and cloud architecture. Outdated application, infrastructure, data and security stacks hinder both customer and employee experiences – and your top and bottom lines. Fast forward a bit, and finding employees with the necessary skills to maintain aging technology becomes increasingly difficult.
The path forward starts with understanding what you're up against. Technical debt shows up in four distinct ways, each with its own impact on your organization's ability to innovate and compete.
Four types of technical debt holding you back
- Architecture debt results from legacy applications and infrastructure that are challenging to integrate with modern tools and AI-enabled technologies. You miss out on the necessary testing, deployment and cloud capabilities to optimize applications and lack the clean, accurate data needed to feed AI models.
- Process debt happens when technical or business processes require heavy manual lifting to manage. Over time, legacy processes stall progress, complicate decision-making and take focus away from teams eager to innovate. It involves the steps, approvals and habits that no longer serve agile, fast-moving organizations.
- Security debt results when organizations don’t have the security posture necessary to remediate vulnerabilities and identify issues when enhancing and deploying applications. It’s the accumulated gap between your ideal state of protection and your current security posture. This can lead to a buildup of quick fixes, outdated protocols or deferred security updates over time, creating vulnerabilities that slow innovation and increase risk to the business.
- Experience debt happens when there’s a gap between the application experience users expect and the reality of what they receive. The clunky interfaces, slow responses or outdated workflows that contribute to a poor user experience chip away at trust, slow adoption and limit the potential of digital solutions to empower people.
Your applications should drive revenue growth, fuel innovation and strengthen customer and employee loyalty. When you optimize them strategically, you minimize technical debt before it accumulates. Here's how to start.
Assess your technical debt
The right inventory systems make it easier to manage technical debt by providing your organization with visibility into applications in your environment, as well as their purpose, architecture, programming language and other specifics. Include an inventory of your technical debt, which gives you a clear picture of where the majority of your debt resides and its impact on your organization and customers.
This step helps you build a roadmap to reduce and manage technical debt, as well as modernize your environment. You can’t develop an effective plan without a comprehensive understanding of your applications, integrations for each one and the debt associated with each one. Use this roadmap to inform your next steps, prioritizing the moves that deliver the greatest value by increasing your overall revenue or improving your market posture.
How this addresses technical debt: No inventory of your applications is complete without an accounting of the technical debt associated with them. It’s also the start of modernization that can reduce all four types of technical debt.
Accelerate modernization with AI
Historically, application modernization projects have required significant effort and resources, and have taken long cycles to complete, from understanding new requirements to designing systems, testing and deployment. It often requires fine-tuning the user experience and diverting internal resources from other organizational initiatives. These complexities are why many companies accrue technical debt.
Agentic and generative AI have changed the game, making modernization easier and faster than ever before. AI can automatically write requirements, develop test cases, write code and more. With these capabilities now mature and accessible, there's never been a better moment to address your technical debt.
AI accelerates modernization in three critical ways:
- Modernizing, managing and deploying code automatically
- Driving better experiences by giving you visibility into consumer intent
- Patching application security vulnerabilities automatically
How this addresses technical debt: AI and automation can minimize manual application management, leading to more user-friendly applications and reducing process and experience debt. It also accelerates application development, allowing you to reduce the costs of maintaining legacy applications and avoid the roadblocks that contribute to technical debt.
Minimize technical debt with Unisys
Every dollar you free from maintaining legacy systems is a dollar you can invest in innovation. Your organization grows more robust and nimble. Tackle technical debt in one application, and you create momentum to address it across your entire portfolio.
To help you gain a deeper understanding of your applications and technical debt, Unisys offers a Rapid Value Assessment: Application Managed Services. This two- to four-week AI-assisted engagement evaluates your current application operations and delivers a prioritized roadmap with actionable recommendations for reducing technical debt, implementing intelligent automation and modernizing your application portfolio.
