Why licence management should be mission critical
Audits conducted by resellers and vendors indicate that up to 35% of licences were found to be either underutilised or redundant.
Published on 25th June 2025
Uncontrolled technology sprawl can lead to myriad risks within organisations, making regular reviews and licensing assessments crucial for business.
This is according to Natasha Bezuidenhout, Head of Cloud Services at Altron Digital Business, who says many organisations are losing control of their technology estates and licence management.
Bezuidenhout says: “Technology sprawl – also known as IT sprawl or tool sprawl, occurs when an organisation accumulates a wide and often uncoordinated set of technologies, tools, platforms and systems across its environment. The leading contributors to this sprawl are rapid cloud adoption, lack of enterprise architecture discipline and regular technology optimisation, and sometimes decentralised decision-making.”
As businesses grow, merge or transform, their digital footprint expands, which can result in licences being over-purchased or misaligned to actual usage, and redundant tools going unnoticed and driving up costs.
She says managing technology estates remains a complex administrative overhead for many organisations: “With the complexity of licensing management and understanding the compliance requirements from vendors, the management of these environments sometimes takes a back door and is not a business focus area. This leads to environments that are not running optimally and are not effectively licensed.”
Bezuidenhout notes that local enterprise audits conducted by resellers and vendors like Microsoft partners or software asset management firms indicate that up to 35% of licences were found to be either underutilised or redundant.
Risks of unchecked sprawl
Allowing this sprawl to continue unchecked can result in risks such as security vulnerabilities, operational fragility and downtime, and slowed agility and innovation, she says. “Organisations face increased risks of vendor audits and non-compliance, and IT teams lack a unified view of what’s being used, by whom and for what, and organisations can develop strategic blind spots.”
Within technology sprawl, poorly managed software licensing can rack up costs, Bezuidenhout says.
“The cost implications of technology sprawl include increased IT spend via redundant licensing and subscriptions, higher integration and development costs, hidden costs from shadow IT and poor ROI due to delayed projects. In addition, legacy systems not retired on time may lead to unsustainable tech maintenance over time and unnecessary software investments,” she says. “All vendors have compliance criteria associated with how licences should be leveraged in an environment. Missing these and being audited could result in hefty penalties.”
Audits and assessments
Regular licensing assessments and audits help organisations mitigate the risks and costs of technology sprawl, says Bezuidenhout. “The standard approach would be to complete an annual review, however, where customers have an active change-over in staff or resources and where systems and licensing requirements change. However, it is more effective to complete these validations twice yearly,” she says.
“Assessments identify the correct types of licensing to be used and ensure that licensing is assigned and activated correctly. Cost savings are achieved by not paying for unnecessary assignments and ensuring the most cost-effective ways of licensing the environment have been applied.
Bezuidenhout adds: “We find that more organisations are opting in for licensing assessment support as a service to help them overcome their technology sprawl.”
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Saepul Bahri via Vecteezy
