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08/07/2026 6:52 pm
TL;DR: As SaaS, multi-cloud, and shadow IT spread software buying across the business, Software Asset Management is shifting from license counting to governance, with Gartner projecting SaaS spend to reach 295 billion US dollars and IaaS to 232 billion US dollars. The governance gap is now the risk: fragmented data, weak ownership, and unmanaged renewals turn SAM into a control problem, not an inventory exercise.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Efecte: Die Zukunft des Software Asset Managements
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should organisations govern software assets across SaaS and cloud environments?
A: They should treat SAM as a governance process, not an audit spreadsheet.
Q: Why do decentralized software purchases create governance risk?
A: Decentralized purchases create risk because they break the link between what is bought, who owns it, and whether it is still needed.
Q: What do teams get wrong about software license optimisation?
A: They often try to optimise before they have trustworthy inventory and entitlement data.
Practitioner guidance
- Map software ownership to accountable business functions Create a current-state inventory that links each major SaaS and cloud service to a named owner, purchasing route, renewal date, and usage source.
- Build a central entitlement reconciliation layer Consolidate contracts, subscriptions, usage telemetry, and deployment records into one decision dataset before attempting optimisation.
- Prioritise the highest-spend and highest-risk vendors first Start governance remediation with the products that combine material cost exposure, compliance sensitivity, and broad business adoption.
What's in the full article
Efecte's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- The specific three-step SAM centralisation approach described in the article, including prioritisation, data collection, and database consolidation.
- The NASA example with the reported 20 million US dollars in penalties and 15 million US dollars in unused Oracle licensing.
- The governance roles the article assigns across IT, procurement, finance, and legal for a federated SAM model.
- The webinar and tool-demo material for teams that want implementation examples rather than governance framing.
👉 Read Efecte's analysis of why software asset management needs governance →
SAM governance in fragmented software estates: where teams are falling short?
Explore further
08/07/2026 7:14 pm
SAM is becoming an identity governance problem, not just a cost-control problem. Once software buying, usage, and renewal decisions are decentralised, the organisation is really managing accountable access to software assets across people, contracts, and machine-consumed services. That makes the discipline structurally similar to lifecycle governance in IAM and NHI programmes. The implication is that SAM maturity now depends on whether the enterprise can assign ownership and review authority across the full asset lifecycle.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Only 19.6% of security professionals express strong confidence in their organisation's ability to securely manage non-human workload identities, according to The 2024 Non-Human Identity Security Report.
- A separate finding shows that 88.5% of organisations acknowledge their non-human IAM practices lag behind or are merely on par with their human IAM efforts.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who should be accountable for SAM governance in a fragmented organisation?
A: Accountability should be shared, but not diffuse. SAM works best when one function owns the operating model while IT, procurement, finance, and legal contribute the data and decisions that keep it current. If everyone is responsible, no one is accountable enough to drive change.
👉 Read our full editorial: Software asset management needs governance, not just license counts
