2025
Proper IT asset management (ITAM) is foundational to managing your dynamic IT environment, but it comes with its own set of unique challenges. ITAM is an essential process that enables you to optimize your IT assets by improving performance, mitigating security risks and reducing costs. However, ITAM tools and processes are evolving quickly as the IT landscape becomes more complex across on-premises, SaaS, the cloud and hybrid environments.
The Flexera 2025 State of ITAM Report provides insight into the makeup and focus of ITAM teams at enterprise-level organizations and offers perspectives and advice on current trends. The report takes a high-level view of IT investments across public, hybrid and SaaS technologies.
Report highlights
Here’s a sample of key findings from this year’s report, which represent trends in ITAM, based on a worldwide survey of 506 IT professionals.
What’s your estimated wasted spend across your IT estate?
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Source: Flexera 2025 State of ITAM Report
Desktop spend continues to be one of the areas of most waste. As more applications move to the cloud, on-premises licenses are often forgotten.
How much do you estimate your organization has spent on software vendor audits over the past 3 years?
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Source: Flexera 2025 State of ITAM Report
Nearly half of organizations (45%) have paid more than $1 million in audit expenses in the past three years.
What SAM-focused responsibilities does your ITAM team have?
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Source: Flexera 2025 State of ITAM Report
Tracking the use of software licenses in public cloud environments has increased 3 percentage points year over year.
Which of the following teams does your SAM team have significant interaction with?
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Source: Flexera 2025 State of ITAM Report
Interaction with cloud (44%) and FinOps (38%) teams continues to grow year over year.
Table of contents
Key findings
Collaboration is growing
Collaboration between ITAM and FinOps teams has increased by 6 percentage points year over year, and other cloud teams by 3 percentage points year over year. In 2024, we saw more focus on cloud license management among advanced ITAM teams, while this year it’s not just advanced ITAM teams focused on cloud license management but beginners and intermediate users as well. Among European respondents, we see that collaboration between ITAM and FinOps has grown at an even more staggering rate from 29% to 43% year over year. As more workloads move to the cloud, collaboration between FinOps and ITAM will become even more essential.
Priorities and challenges are evolving
It’s not surprising that ITAM teams reporting to security or FinOps leaders are more likely to be focused on tracking the use of SaaS applications, with security disciplines focused on reducing shadow IT and FinOps disciplines focused on optimizing SaaS costs. What’s interesting is that the complexity of software use rights has become a much bigger challenge, moving up in ranking from sixth place to first this year. This is mostly due to the complexity of software use rights in the cloud and more companies moving resources to cloud services. Finding ways to optimize software use is still a top priority among all organizations, but a lack of resources on the SAM team continues to be a struggle. Managing software licenses in containers is less of a focus this year, with less than 50% of organizations focusing on this task. Saving money on SaaS is becoming more and more of a priority: We’ve seen a steady increase of 7 percentage points in tracking SaaS usage over a two-year time, and an 8 percentage point increase over the same time for rightsizing SaaS contracts.
Audits continue to be a top concern
Although it remains the top priority for SAM professionals this year, it seems organizations haven’t found a way to mitigate the impact of audits, and, similar to survey results from last year, nearly half (45%) of organizations paid more than $1 million in audit fines over the past three years. Microsoft (50%) continues to be the top vendor auditing survey respondents, followed by IBM and SAP (37% and 32%, respectively). As previously mentioned, reasons audits might still be a challenge is the complexity of use rights and more companies moving resources to the cloud. Although enterprises are doing a better job with optimizing license spend, audit defense is still an issue.
IT visibility is improving—in some areas
Visibility into on-premises hardware and software grew from around two-thirds of organizations last year to 76% and 75% this year, respectively. Furthermore, 63% of respondents say they have visibility into cloud instances. That being said, only half feel comfortable with SaaS, and visibility into BYOL positions is still extremely low at only 27%. You can’t manage what you can’t see—and it’s fundamental to have complete visibility into your IT estate and assets. Overall, respondents seemed less confident in their complete IT estate visibility: This percentage dropped from 47% to 43% year over year and may be influenced by more companies moving software to the cloud.