If you have ever gone down the rabbit hole of information on Microsoft Intune pricing, you know how quickly the options multiply. There are Standalone plans, Microsoft 365 bundles, and Enterprise Mobility and Security suites, each one promising slightly different things at slightly different price points.

Organisations often default to higher-tier plans, thinking they need everything, only to find that a large chunk of their workforce uses a fraction of those features.

The variety sounds helpful until you are actually trying to decide, and then it just gets confusing fast. The bigger problem is what happens after organisations commit to a Microsoft Intune licensing plan. Frontline workers rarely need the same access tier as developers or finance teams, yet all groups often end up on identical plans.

How to address licensing complexity with your Intune use:

Industry analysts expect more than one-third of VMware workloads to move to alternative platforms by 2028. That projection reflects a reassessment of vendor dependency and long-term cost predictability, pressures intensified by ongoing supply chain delays and rising hardware costs. Pricing changes and bundled licensing have introduced uncertainty into infrastructure planning, prompting many leaders to reconsider whether maintaining the status quo still makes sense.

At the same time, modernisation pressures are building. Hybrid cloud has become foundational and application teams increasingly develop in containers. AI workloads are moving from experimentation into production. These shifts require platforms that can support traditional virtualisation alongside modern application models, without adding operational complexity.

Some enterprises are responding by containing their existing VMware environments while directing new workloads elsewhere. Others, according to Lee Caswell, SVP of Product and Solutions Marketing at Nutanix, are evaluating full platform transitions to regain flexibility and cost control.

Early FinOps practices were designed to track spend. While this remains true today, it’s no longer enough, as retrospective reporting does usually not prevent overspending.

As the business world evolves, tools should evolve with them, and instead of only showing what was spent, platforms should support forecasting, budgeting, and automated governance. These capabilities influence behaviour before the money leaves the account. They allow finance and engineering teams to work with the same data and the same targets, allowing accountability to be spread across the business.

To no surprise, cutting costs is important, but FinOps should also show whether cloud spend is paying off for the business. That means tracking the full journey of an application, from when it’s launched to when it’s retired, and weighing up cost against performance and sustainability.

Many organisations started doing this through unit economics, where costs are broken down per customer, transaction, or service. It gives a clearer picture of value, but only if the data coming from FinOps tools is accurate. Without that, it’s impossible to see whether an application is worth what it costs.

In the early days of computing, even the early days of the modern PC, software was usually written from scratch, but as the complexity of operating systems and software began to grow, it just didn’t make sense to keep reinventing the wheel. So software became modular. Instead of writing a function by hand, you’d call that function from a shared library.

Just like any software, some libraries are proprietary and have to be licensed from the owner, but many others are open-source. Wikipedia maintains a comprehensive list of open source software libraries if you want to see just how many different ones there are. I’d feel pretty confident in saying that nearly all software you use today does rely on at least one of these libraries.

By relying on libraries for common functions, software developers can divert resources to the features that are truly new and unique in their software.

Workers connect through:

Thanks to AI-accelerated delivery, the ROI on replacing expensive SaaS has become so compelling that any business spending over $40,000 per month on software license should already be considering a shift to custom.

“We’ve seen returns in as little as six months, and in more complex builds, it can take up to four years,” said Beyers.

“Even at the longer end, a four-year return outpaces most capital investment decisions a business will make.”

Beyers added that there is additional value that often goes forgotten – avoiding the cost of things you can’t do when stuck on someone else’s platform.

“You can’t innovate because the system won’t flex. You can’t integrate the way your business needs because the vendor’s API doesn’t support it. You’re waiting on their roadmap for features you need now and if they ever deliver them, you’ll pay for the customisation on top of the licence.”

“In the age of AI, that trade-off no longer makes sense.”

Barnard says some of the biggest asset management challenges in organisations today are the distributed management of assets, inconsistent process controls and a lack of organisational awareness.

“Because IT and enterprise assets are purchased, received, and/or often managed in a distributed manner, this can result in a lack of visibility of the assets, which subsequently impacts audits and validation. This can also lead to workers’ perceptions that the assets ‘belong’ to them and not the organisation,” he says. “There is a tendency for department managers and end-users to hold onto assets they do not use at all or on a regular basis, which includes laptops, desktops, mobile devices and software applications. This ‘asset hoarding’ can lead to continued purchasing of assets the same as those already owned, but not used or fully utilised. Unused IT and enterprise assets pose increased security and audit risks, as well as driving up costs related to acquiring assets.”

Barnard also highlights the problem of inconsistent or a lack of process controls: “Due to a distributed approach, IT asset management (ITAM), software asset management (SAM) and enterprise asset management (EAM) may be perceived as functions, rather than an unified, organisational discipline. This means any processes and controls that do exist are only applied to the function – not to the organisation.”

He says the challenge with this is policy enforcement: “Many asset policies are at the enterprise levels and don’t reflect the reality or current state of the assets. A common issue with policies, regardless of whether they are valid, is that they are not enforced as they should be. This exposes great financial, compliance and security risks to the organisation.”

Another challenge is organisational awareness, he says. “Even where there are policies and proper processes and controls in place, the organisation (both IT and the enterprise) may not be fully aware of what they are, or why they are important, and may simply ignore them or bypass them,” he says.

“Problems arise either because of no defined scope and/or an understanding of what constitutes an IT asset, an outdated scope, or just a scope that is not well-defined or commonly understood, people are left to their own determination and assumption about what they’re supposed to do when it comes to purchasing or managing IT assets.”

This can lead to shadow IT and external purchasing of assets, which is often, but not always, caused by a traditional procurement-focused approach. Barnard says this typically indicates a lack of awareness of the proper IT or enterprise asset acquisition processes, or the lack of these processes, but is also influenced by the perceived lack of responsiveness from the IT organisation. This can lead to uncontrolled IT assets being introduced into the enterprise, which increases costs as well as security and compliance risks.

Barnard adds that while ITAM and SAM can be managed separately, converging these disciplines and sharing the tools and processes used can reduce complexity and costs.

Beerware
Authored by Poul-Henning Kamp, this is a concise attribution-style license, meaning a developer can appropriate the software but must retain the license with the code. It became well-known for gently suggesting that you buy the copyright holder a beer if you find the software useful.

Drinkware
The Beerware License, but modified to allow the copyright holder to parameterise with another type of drink. It’s very flexible in this regard: coffee, martini, Veuve Clicquot? It’s up to the licensor.

Strong Beerware
The Black Duck Audit team coined the name of this one. Clearly inspired by the Beerware License, it’s actually the MIT License but with the obligation to buy the copyright holder a beer. In recent years, we’ve seen even license-conservative companies like Google get comfortable with the Beerware License, but the obligatory nature of this one is likely beyond the risk tolerance of most IP attorneys.

Around the same time your users stopped gathering in one office, tools like Slack, Teams, and Notion became where project decisions get made, client context gets shared, and onboarding documentation gets built. If you work at a smaller company, a significant chunk of your institutional knowledge could well have migrated into these platforms without anyone noticing.

Several collaboration platform vendors have been investing in features that move them closer to enterprise readiness. Slack offers compliance exports on higher-tier plans, Teams integrates with Microsoft Purview for retention governance, and Notion has added admin controls and workspace analytics. But none of these add up to what IT would consider a true backup.

On Slack’s free plan, messages become hidden after 90 days and are permanently deleted after one year. Paid plans keep messages accessible indefinitely, though if an admin deletes a channel or a departing employee’s account gets deprovisioned, that history can still vanish, taking years of project decisions with it.

Teams stores messages in Exchange Online and governs retention through Microsoft Purview, but configuring retention policies requires at least a Microsoft 365 E3 or Business Premium subscription. Recovering a specific deleted conversation means an admin has to run an eDiscovery search (end users can’t do it themselves). Notion keeps pages as long as your workspace exists, but version history on the free plan covers only a few days, and deleted pages auto-purge from trash after 30 days. You can manually export data, but there’s no scheduled backup and restoring requires contacting Notion support.

Even if the immediate financial hit from losing data on any of these platforms is modest, the staff hours spent reconstructing project context add up fast. If you’re subject to HIPAA, SOX, or similar regulations, the compliance exposure can be worse than the operational disruption.

Ouribank, a fintech leader in financial services in Brazil, worked to focus its FinOps strategy. When they started, cost visibility remained fragmented across development, operations and finance teams. Rather than pursuing immediate cost cuts, they followed the FinOps Foundation’s framework for a phased roadmap, which was stewarded by a dedicated FinOps specialist.

They prioritised low-operational quick wins in numerous ways, including: