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12/06/2026 1:14 am
TL;DR: High-growth companies are overbuying SaaS, with organisations over 1,000 employees using about 500 applications on average and wasting one-third of that budget on unused licenses, according to Zluri. The governance issue is no longer just cost containment: unmanaged app usage creates access, renewal, and control gaps that IAM teams cannot ignore.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Zluri: SaaS Management How High-Growth Companies Can Reduce SaaS Spend
By the numbers:
- In 2018, a company spent around $343,000 on SaaS, which is a 78% increase compared to the previous year.
- around 33% of all SaaS software spend is wasted across organizations
- around 80% of employees
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams govern shadow IT in SaaS environments?
A: Start by treating shadow IT as an inventory and access problem, not just a policy violation.
Q: Why do overlapping SaaS apps create more risk than simple budget waste?
A: Because each extra application adds its own identity boundary, permission model, and offboarding path.
Q: What signals show that SaaS license management is working?
A: Look for fewer premium licenses left idle, a shorter gap between usage decline and downgrade, and a clear owner for every renewal decision.
Practitioner guidance
- Inventory all SaaS applications and owners Create a single register that includes sanctioned and unsanctioned tools, named business owners, renewal dates, and the identities tied to each app.
- Right-size licenses from observed usage Compare premium tiers against actual feature consumption and downgrade roles that do not use advanced capability.
- Eliminate overlapping tools before entitlement tuning Map duplicate functionality across collaboration, file storage, task management, and analytics tools, then retire the weaker or unused option.
What's in the full article
Zluri's full blog post covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- App comparison examples for consolidating overlapping SaaS tools across teams and functions.
- Step-by-step usage analysis for deciding when to downgrade or remove premium licenses.
- Practical procurement questions for identifying shadow IT before renewals and spend reviews.
- Operational guidance on mapping transactions, contracts, and subscriptions to individual users and applications.
👉 Read Zluri's analysis of how high-growth companies can reduce SaaS spend →
SaaS sprawl and shadow IT: what IAM teams need to fix?
Explore further
12/06/2026 11:01 am
SaaS sprawl is an identity governance problem disguised as cost leakage. The article treats waste as a budget issue, but the underlying failure is that every extra application adds another identity boundary, another lifecycle to manage, and another review queue to maintain. In that sense, software bloat becomes governance bloat. The practitioner conclusion is simple: if you cannot inventory the app, you cannot govern the identity surface attached to it.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 79% of organisations have experienced secrets leaks, with 77% of these incidents resulting in tangible damage, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- 96% of organisations store secrets outside of secrets managers in vulnerable locations including code, config files, and CI/CD tools.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How can organisations reduce SaaS spend without weakening access control?
A: Cut duplication first, then tie entitlements to actual use, and only then remove excess licenses. That sequence preserves business access while reducing waste. If you do it in the reverse order, you risk leaving users in the wrong tool or preserving a redundant application just because nobody wants to own the change.
👉 Read our full editorial: SaaS sprawl and shadow IT are now identity governance issues
