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.

The power and flexibility that the cloud provides has been game-changing for organisations both large and small. It has democratised access to IT resources that would normally have been out of reach for all but the largest organisations. Cloud offerings, which started with the core set of compute, networking, and storage have branched out into services encompassing virtually every corner of the IT landscape–databases, caching, queuing, orchestration, containers, AI and machine learning, just to name a few. And with this enhanced ability to access the vast array of services, comes the ability to accumulate a vast amount of cloud spend. A lot of cloud spend.

Each of the cloud provider services has their own pricing model, and the invoice data for these services takes many forms, none of which are standardised across different cloud providers, and sometimes not even across services within the same provider. This leads to lengthy and complex cloud bills. As an example, multiple customers generate cloud bills that contain several hundred million rows of billing data each month across multiple cloud providers, with different usage, cost, and identifier formats.

Enter cloud cost management.

One of the key challenges in SaaS management is the decentralisation of contracts across various departments. Without a single view of all contracts, it becomes increasingly difficult to track renewal dates, service level agreements (SLAs) and vendor performance. This lack of oversight can lead to costly mistakes, such as missing renewal deadlines or overpaying for unused licenses.

Centralising SaaS contract management through a dedicated platform helps organisations consolidate all contract data into one system. This centralised system provides comprehensive visibility into contract terms, pricing, renewal dates and vendor performance. For IT leaders, having this centralised view is crucial for aligning software expenditures with business goals. By understanding how each contract supports or hinders organisational objectives, you can make more informed decisions, mitigate compliance risks and negotiate better terms with vendors.