For CIOs and technology leaders, legacy infrastructure that once drove efficiency is now holding the business back. It drains IT resources, heightens security risk, and stalls innovation, turning yesterday’s assets into today’s liabilities.

Legacy systems, often rooted in organisational operations, are becoming increasingly brittle. They are costly to maintain, complex to scale, and increasingly fragile. According to McKinsey, technical debt consumes 20-40% of IT resources, diverting resources from innovation to maintenance. Moreover, nearly 80% of IT budgets are spent on maintaining and operating existing and legacy IT systems, leaving little room for innovation.

Still, most modernisation strategies rely on “rip-and-replace” approaches, advocating for full system replacement that is disruptive, expensive, and often unfeasible for large enterprises. Given the sheer scale, criticality of existing systems and regulatory environments, these strategies introduce what many organisations would consider to be unacceptable risk.

The true cost of technical debt

As legacy systems age, their cost compounds across every layer of the enterprise. What begins as an architectural inefficiency soon creates a ripple effect across compliance and innovation:

  • Rising infrastructure costs: Over 70% of IT budgets are spent on “keeping the lights on”, not innovation, as legacy infrastructure demands ever-increasing support. IDC forecasts that worldwide spending on digital transformation will reach almost $4 trillion by 2027, highlighting the costs associated with maintaining outdated systems. Instead of building scalable, AI-ready infrastructure, IT teams are trapped in a cycle of patching and maintenance.
  • Increased security vulnerabilities: Outdated systems are not only harder to manage, but they are also harder to secure. IDC reports that more than 60% of organisations cite legacy systems as a top security concern due to integration challenges and their lack of support. Without consistent policy enforcement, ungoverned data creates blind spots and increases compliance risk.
  • Data silos and inaccessibility: Across large organisations, valuable information is often locked away in siloed or legacy content platforms. Up to 73% of enterprise data remains unused for analytics, in part because teams are unaware of its existence or can’t access it efficiently. This “dark data” undermines transformation efforts and delays the move towards AI-ready infrastructure.
  • Barriers to automation and AI:  Modern digital transformation strategies rely on clean, classified and governed data, but technical debt creates rigid architectures that hinder Enterprise AI implementation. According to Deloitte, 69% of CIOs cite unstructured and inconsistent data as a key roadblock to AI implementation. Without integrated information lifecycle management, enterprises cannot trust their data enough to scale AI or automation initiatives.

While legacy-system modernisation is no longer optional, a complete replacement is rarely realistic.

A new approach to modernisation, from the inside out

Reducing technical debt doesn’t necessarily require ripping out legacy systems. EncompaaS provides a low-disruption path to legacy system modernisation by overlaying existing infrastructure, connecting disparate data sources and applying automated governance without costly migrations or operational downtime.

Here’s how the platform works to reduce technical debt:

  • Federated access, no migration: EncompaaS integrates with your existing infrastructure and legacy content systems, providing unified governance without the need for centralised storage. It uses policy-based automation to handle large-scale retention, safe deletion, and content enrichment, ensuring effective management of the information lifecycle.
  • Automated policy enforcement: EncompaaS provides federated visibility across siloed systems, reducing reliance on fragile legacy connectors and unlocking dark data without moving it. This enables cross-platform insight, supports AI-ready infrastructure, and aligns legacy environments with current data governance standards.
  • Progressive enrichment and cleanup: EncompaaS uses machine learning to discover redundant, obsolete, or sensitive content. This enables safe deletion, storage optimisation, and risk reduction ahead of GenAI integrations. Unlike rip-and-replace strategies, it supports incremental modernisation without disrupting operations
  • Centralised control without centralising storage: EncompaaS provides a single control plane for governance, policy enforcement, and lifecycle automation, without centralising storage. By decoupling governance from location, it simplifies enterprise data architecture, reduces overhead, and enables proactive compliance across hybrid environments

What CIOs gain with EncompaaS modernisation

EncompaaS enables CIOs to reduce technical debt without the risk, cost, or downtime of full system replacement. As a governance and enrichment overlay, it works with existing infrastructure to:

  • Simplify enterprise data architecture
  • Eliminate redundant content
  • Reduce reliance on brittle custom connectors

This supports scalable legacy system modernisation and allows IT leaders to make incremental progress while maintaining business continuity. According to IDC, 83% of enterprises are now actively managing their legacy infrastructure to reduce complexity and improve agility across transformation programs.

By automating policy enforcement, classification and defensible deletion, EncompaaS relieves IT teams of manual data handling.  Less time spent maintaining legacy systems means more time for innovation, strategy, and delivery. 

Improved information lifecycle management also enhances compliance and operational efficiency, reducing storage costs, audit burdens, and supporting defensible data retention. Cyber incidents cost enterprises an average of $4.45 million per breach. With safe deletion and complete visibility across repositories, EncompaaS lowers risk and minimises the organisation’s attack surface.

Enable AI-ready infrastructure

As Gartner notes, trusted data is the foundation of any successful AI deployment. Without it, risks like hallucinations, compliance breaches, and inaccurate outputs quickly follow.

EncompaaS ensures enterprise content is accurate, enriched and governed, delivering the confidence required to support tools like Microsoft Copilot and other GenAI applications.

By working across existing infrastructure, EncompaaS enables scalable modernisation without the disruption of legacy system replacement, giving CIOs a faster, lower-risk path to AI readiness and accelerating digital transformation across the enterprise.