Comfortable with your IT or just familiar?
Chief Technology Officer Steve O’Brien shows how evidence-based readiness can create lasting confidence in your systems.
Happy with your IT?
Dashboard showing lots of green?
No big headaches?
Perfect – job done…
Most customers I talk to are quite happy with their systems. They’re running how they should and fit the demands of the business. They’ve weathered periods of downtime and the team knows them inside out, meaning future hiccups are safely in hand.
They feel confident in their IT, but as operations encounter increasing demands, complexity and scrutiny, are they mistaking confidence for comfort? Is familiarity masking issues that could introduce fragility, risk and paralysis later down the line, or at the worst possible time?
Uptime and familiarity are important but shouldn’t be relied upon. True confidence is based on evidence, planning, and a lasting readiness that benefits long after go-live. Here’s how you can ensure your confidence is well-placed and indicative of the bigger picture.
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Why does the IT comfort trap exist?
As an organisation matures, so does its IT system. In most I work with, there’s a team of true experts administering it. They understand the business risks that come with downtime and latency, so they become adept at making systems work capably in the background.
These IT estates are a patchwork, but their people responsible for them are pros who understand how individual applications and systems interact. They know the failure points and workarounds, so as more functionality is added, users don’t experience any impact.
The system – often a mish-mash of legacy IT and hybrid cloud – feels safe, but as with anything that’s added to and adapted over time, cracks can slowly appear in the foundations. Technical debt, failure points, and security risks accumulate, but because they’re not visible, they don’t get fixed.
What are the risks of familiar IT?
If your IT has an underlying fragility, you could be inviting all sorts of headaches. These can prevent your organisation from experiencing positive outcomes like modernisation, innovative new functionality, increased security, and better business performance. Understanding them is your first step to regaining control.
Technical debt
As your team introduces quick fixes or rely on temporary solutions, over time, the system can begin to creak. Underlying issues are masked, and rising complexity makes wholesale solutions and critical fixes much more difficult. It’s a common problem: according to Gartner, as much as 40% of infrastructure suffered from technical debt in 2026.
It’s understanding when to modernise before technical debt holds you back.
Poor visibility
To get the most from your IT, you need a clear and complete view of how they work, interact and perform. Complicated but familiar IT often doesn’t allow this, as a true appraisal is hampered by poor documentation, limited monitoring, and critical knowledge only existing in the heads of senior experts.
Fragile integrations
Older systems are often connected to newer apps using temporary fixes, custom code or outdated interfaces. As more systems are added, these connections become tough to maintain. That’s not a problem for a while: familiarity comes from understanding the limitations of the technology. Yet, eventually, one small change in a system can cause others to fail.
This issue is a particular focus for large public organisations like the NHS which require interoperability and constant continuity but rely on a library of legacy systems. As the NHS’ 10 year plan kicks into gear, a smooth move from analogue to digital is key for improving confidence in health technology.
Limited recoverability
Legacy systems often lack modern backup and disaster recovery capabilities, or have poorly documented processes. That makes recovery slow and manual, hampering restoration efforts after a failure.
Security exposure
If you rely on a mix of systems, some may lack modern controls or no longer receive updates. Vulnerabilities, weak authentication methods, and outdated software can invite exploits. And if new systems like AI are introduced, adoption can overtake oversight – in 2025, IBM reported that many organisations experiencing data breaches lacked the relevant governance policies for the system that was breached.
Rising costs
Maintaining fragile systems requires specialist skills, frequent repairs, and increasing effort. Rather than aiding modernisation and innovation, your budget is spent on hardware replacement, software support, and workarounds.
Another area we often see affected by rising costs is the cloud. In Ekco’s 2025 survey, 54% of IT decision makers said they lacked complete visibility into cloud spend and only one-third of their cloud projects delivered every goal. 71% said outdated on-prem technology was holding them back.
Poor readiness
The pace of change is only speeding up, but AI, data and automation tools rely on accessible, high-quality data and modern system integration. Legacy systems often store data in isolated formats, lack APIs, and require manual processes, making it difficult to modernise effectively. A platform can be stable and still not be ready for what the business needs next.
True confidence also lets you invest faster and more clearly in new technology. Take AI. McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI research found that 88% of organisations used AI, but most projects remained in experimentation or pilot phases. Only 39% reported EBIT impact at enterprise level. If more organisations had clarity with simpler, more efficient systems, more of these pilots might be able to drive a return.
Once these issues stop lurking in the background, their effects often trigger action. Support ends, products reach end-of-life or performance capacity peaks. Compliance requirements change, recovery tests fail and new technologies can’t get off the ground due to the weight of legacy. The gap between familiarity and confidence is exposed, but how can we bridge the gap?
What does genuine technology confidence look like?
True confidence in technology is all about building proven, secure foundations, that are built to evolve, rather than relying on reactive fixes. It’s about actions being led by evidence, not assumption. It means knowing what you have, why it is there, how it performs, how it’s secured, what it costs, how it recovers and how it will evolve.
So, how do you make all that happen?
1. Make better decisions upfront
Start by defining the problem clearly before choosing the technological solution. Look at various possible routes rather than taking the default path. And ensure that your technology choices are aligned with the business outcomes you want to improve from the get-go.
2. Build security and resilience into the foundation
Ensure that the design of your IT embeds security, compliance and governance and that resilience spans infrastructure, network and operations so no corner of your organisation is exposed. This is all part of treating cyber risk as a business continuity issue, not just a problem for IT.
3. Deliver without disruption
To make sure you can cope with disruption, you should invest in well-structured transition and implementation planning. During periods of change, allow some flex in your processes to reduce the operational burden on teams. That way, they can maintain productivity and service continuity, even during transformation.
4. Evidence control, not assumptions
To gain real visibility across environments, you can’t rely on any guesswork. Governance and reporting need to be made measurable. And accountability shouldn’t be seen as purely internal: suppliers and services should be in clear focus too.
5. Focus beyond go-live
Strong IT isn’t about meeting the deadline – it requires ongoing optimisation and lifecycle management. Your team should aim to continuously improve security and performance so it’s perfectly aligned to the evolving needs of your business and its technology.
Trust in technology comes from confidence in the decision, route, delivery, and ongoing outcome – not just the platform.
IT confidence is a discipline everyone can learn – with the right help.
It’s important to note that we’re not telling you (and you don’t need) to replace everything at once. It’s all about the mindset shift: moving from treating ‘still working’ as the same as ‘ready for what’s next’.
Sure, some changes might be needed, but confidence doesn’t magically appear once you migrate; it’s maintained through lifecycle management, optimisation, governance, reporting and continuous improvement.
We can help bring predictability to your IT decision making. Working closely with your team to understand your estate, your objectives, and the work needed to get from A to B, we remove ambiguity around cost, scope and operating model. However complex, hybrid or multi-supplier your environment is, we can help make sense of it and turn passing familiarity into lasting confidence.
