Budgets are tight. Demands are high. Nearly 1 in 3 CIOs say their budgets aren’t keeping pace with business needs, while most CFOs believe they are. With so much pressure mounting for businesses to prioritize big picture IT transformation, hidden costs continue to drain resources from the inside out.
The result: mounting expectations with less room for error.
You don’t always need a full audit to start fixing the problem. With the right checks, small actions can quickly uncover big inefficiencies, from idle licenses to overprovisioned cloud resources.
This guide outlines four fast, practical checks you can run in minutes. They won’t fix everything. But they will help you regain control, free up budget, and strengthen ITFM's foundation.
1. Check your Licences
Most organizations carry more software licenses than they need. Some are tied to former employees, others to tools that haven’t been logged into in months.
Too often, no one notices until renewal comes around — and even then, it’s easier to approve than investigate.
Reports indicate as many as 53% of SaaS licenses are going unused in 2025. And with AI capabilities now baked into premium tiers, license costs are going up. In fact, AI-enabled software is expected to rise by 30% annually.
Quick check:
1. Look at usage reports from top SaaS providers
2. Flag licenses inactive for 30+ days
3. Compare license count to actual headcount or active user list
You don’t need to run a full audit. Even a high-level scan will give you a good sense of whether the numbers are creeping up quietly.
2. Check your Cloud Waste
Cloud waste rarely feels urgent…until it’s too late to explain the bill.
Forgotten dev environments, oversized instances, idle resources. The causes are well known. But because cloud spend is distributed, the symptoms don’t always surface centrally.
32% of enterprise cloud spend is marked as wasted. At the same time, Gartner predicts that public cloud will represent over 51% of enterprise IT spend by the end of this year.
That means any waste is only going to get more expensive.
Quick check:
1. Pull a usage vs. provisioned report from your cloud provider
2. Flag idle environments or workloads that haven’t changed in 30 days
3. Review whether test/dev instances are still needed
You’re not looking to reshape your FinOps strategy here. Just identify what’s clearly over-provisioned, so the team can act before it’s questioned elsewhere.
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3. Check your tools
Tool sprawl happens over time. A team needs something fast, signs up, and forgets. Or one tool replaces another, but the old one never gets shut off. Multiply that across departments, and you get a long list of active contracts, many of which have no clear owner.
According to Gartner, 69% of employees will create or modify technology outside of IT’s visibility by 2025. That figure should raise flags… not just for security, but for spending visibility.
Quick check:
1. Categorise tools by purpose: collaboration, analytics, workflow, etc.
2. Look for duplicates or platforms with low usage
3. Ask for confirmation from business unit leads
Redundancy might be the result of shadow IT, legacy contracts, or M&A fallout. Whatever the cause, surfacing it is usually enough to prompt the right conversation.
4. Check Showback / Chargeback
If business units never see what they’re consuming, they have little reason to change behaviour. And while full chargeback models might not be the priority, even a basic showback report starts to drive accountability.
This becomes critical as spend tied to AI and cloud increases.
Quick check:
1. Take one shared IT service (cloud, service desk, etc.)
2. Estimate cost per unit and distribute by department usage
3. Share a simple breakdown with business leads
These steps help put visibility back on the table, so teams can understand the relationship between what they use and what it costs.
You Already Know These. The Point Is to Check Anyway.
These aren’t strategic transformations. They’re basic hygiene…the kind of things that fall off the list when you're focusing on bigger moves.
But in most organizations, they add up to six or even seven figures of unnecessary spend. And the sooner you catch them, the easier they are to fix without raising alarms.
They’re also a good signal, to finance, to the board, and to your own team, that cost control isn’t something you think about once a year. It’s an everyday practice. And it’s one you’re on top of.
Need Help Taking It Further?
These checks are a great place to start. But if you’re spending more time chasing reports than making decisions, it might be time to centralize it all.
Serviceware’s ITFM platform brings together all your IT cost data, licenses, cloud, infrastructure, and internal services, into one clear view. You can track, allocate, and optimise, without needing to chase spreadsheets or wait for quarterly reviews.
Book a 20-minute walkthrough to see how we help CIOs like you go from basic visibility to full control.
