Topic starter
12/06/2026 12:56 am
TL;DR: Rising SaaS spend and unmanaged app usage create hidden costs and governance gaps as organisations lose visibility into licenses, renewals, duplicate tools, and abandoned access, according to Zluri and Gartner. The identity problem is not just overspend: app lifecycle control across people, subscriptions, and access ownership is now a security requirement.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Zluri: “How CFOs can Leverage SMPs to Optimize SaaS Spending?”.
By the numbers:
- Cloud services spiked by 20.4% in 2022 compared to 2021, according to Gartner research cited by Zluri.
- In 2021 the end-users spent $410.9 billion, and in 2022 the numbers reached $494.7 billion, according to Gartner research cited by Zluri.
- The users are expected to spend nearly $600 billion by 2023, according to Gartner research cited by Zluri.
Key questions
Q: How should security teams handle SaaS applications that are bought outside IT?
A: They should bring those apps into a managed inventory, assign business ownership, and require renewal review before the contract continues.
Q: Why do duplicate SaaS apps create identity governance risk?
A: Duplicate apps split ownership, permissions, and data flows across multiple systems that perform the same job.
Q: What breaks when SaaS offboarding is not tied to identity revocation?
A: The organisation keeps paying for applications after the business no longer needs them, and access can remain active even after the relationship should end.
Practitioner guidance
- Map every SaaS app to an accountable owner Assign a business and identity owner to each subscription so renewals, access reviews, and offboarding are not handled as ad hoc exceptions.
- Reconcile active users against paid licenses Compare purchased seats to active accounts on a regular cadence and downsize subscriptions that remain materially underused.
- Eliminate overlapping SaaS tools Inventory apps with the same business function, decide which one is authoritative, and retire the others before duplicate access spreads further.
Bottom line: SaaS overspend and SaaS governance failures often come from the same source: poor visibility into ownership, licensing, and application lifecycle.
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This topic was modified 4 days ago by NHI Mgmt Group
12/06/2026 10:29 am
Abandoned SaaS subscriptions are a lifecycle failure, not only a spend problem. When an app continues after the employee or team that created it no longer needs it, the organisation has lost control of both cost and accountability. That is the same governance gap that lets orphaned access linger in identity programmes, and it is why app ownership has to be treated as a control objective, not an administrative detail.
A few things that frame the scale:
- The average enterprise SaaS platform connects to 42 or more third-party applications through OAuth tokens, API keys, webhooks and automation platforms.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How can organisations tell whether SaaS budget controls are working?
A: Look for fewer orphaned subscriptions, lower duplicate app counts, and clean ownership records tied to each renewal. If finance can explain spend but IAM cannot explain who still has access, the control set is incomplete. Effective governance shows up as aligned inventory, ownership, and access removal.
👉 Read our full editorial: SaaS spend management exposes the hidden identity governance gap
This post was modified 4 days ago by NHI Mgmt Group