IT Asset Management (ITAM) has undergone significant transformations in response to the evolving IT landscape. Initially, ITAM focused on managing the growth of on-premises infrastructure, which presented its own set of challenges. The rise of the cloud has introduced new complexities, such as the need to manage Software as a Service (SaaS) applications and maintain visibility into cloud assets. The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has further accelerated these changes, driving ITAM teams to collaborate more closely with other IT stakeholders, including infrastructure and IT operations, IT service management, and security.
This shift is essential for addressing the multifaceted challenges of modern IT environments.
The Flexera 2025 State of ITAM Report explores these challenges. From the impact of audit fines on the bottom line to the need for added collaboration among ITAM teams, this year's report offers expert insight from more than 500 global tech decision makers on the trends, risks, and actionable strategies shaping the future of IT management.
Comprehensive Tech Stack Visibility Remains Elusive
Despite advancements in ITAM, visibility gaps remain a persistent challenge, especially across cloud, SaaS and Bring Your Own License (BYOL) environments.
Today, only half of IT teams feel confident in their SaaS visibility, and just 27% have clarity across BYOL deployments. These findings are symptomatic of the recent decline in overall confidence around complete IT estate visibility, which dropped from 47% to 43% year-over-year.
As spending surges in these areas and pressure mounts to optimize costs, organizations must rethink their approach. In practice, this means moving beyond traditional discovery tools and investing in real-time tracking for license usage and compliance, clearly defining roles and responsibilities for managing new technologies as they're implemented and cross-functional collaboration between ITAM and FinOps.
The benefits of new technologies can only be realized if leaders have a clear understanding of what they're managing — from the metrics being used to evaluate project success to whether compliance policies are fostering secure and efficient use. End-to-end visibility is the first step toward achieving cost optimization and better decision making.
IT Budgets Strain Under Audit Fines
Audits remain a significant challenge for ITAM teams, with the high time and cost involved being the primary concerns. Nearly half (45%) of surveyed organizations report spending over $1 million on software audits over the past three years, while 23% have spent more than $5 million in 2025 alone. Compared to last year's report, the findings are worryingly similar, showing little headway has been made in mitigating audits' financial impact year-over-year.
Two of the factors that may be triggering ongoing audit challenges is the growing complexity of use rights and companies' continuing to move resources to the cloud. As decision makers migrate workloads to the cloud, teams are left with more moving pieces to manage and ultimately a new level of difficulty in optimizing software assets. At the same time, software teams are seeing their resources become more limited, leaving them stuck having to do more with less and the threat of millions of dollars being drained through audit fines that much greater.
As audit anxiety climbs, IT leaders are turning their focus to defensive measures. Audit defense is more than just protecting the bottom line; it can help organizations expose dangerous gaps in how licenses are being applied and used, shining a light on the increasing need for robust, integrated, and proactive ITAM practices. Taking the time to mitigate potential audits costs — before the audit happens — is key to long-term financial health.
Cross-Functional Collaboration Takes Center Stage
Cloud services are becoming even more business critical, and as organizations continue to migrate workloads, decision makers are looking for actionable strategies to better manage cloud resources — starting with fostering internal collaboration.
Developing strong partnerships across key IT functions has emerged as a top priority, demonstrated by the fact collaboration between ITAM and FinOps teams increased by 6 percentage points and other cloud teams by 3 percentage points year-over-year.
Whether it's audit defense, licensing management, cost control, or cloud license management, strong collaboration across areas of expertise is required to keep pace with today's ecosystem. In particular, cloud license management is an area undergoing notable change. In 2024, there was a greater focus on cloud license management among more advanced ITAM teams, but this year, we saw beginner and intermediate users turn their attention to cloud license management as well.
As the focus on cloud license management becomes widespread and complexity in software management commonplace, partnership between asset management, cloud, and FinOps teams will only need to grow. FinOps has emerged as a key player in IT management, significantly advancing ITAM. The operational framework and cross-team culture of FinOps help maximize the economic value of the cloud. This collaboration is expected to continue as more workloads shift to the cloud, enabling better cost management and optimization.
Establishing regular communication channels, cross-training, and shared metrics will promote a unified, agile approach, built on the open exchange of information and data, especially as workloads continue to shift to the cloud.
ITAM Is Always Evolving and Organizations Must Keep Up
ITAM as a business function is still maturing, and a mindset of continuous improvement and collaboration will be key. ITAM is not an isolated discipline and must work closely with other IT stakeholders to ensure smooth coordination and prevent critical issues from being overlooked. Thinking of the remainder of this year and beyond, leaders must commit to making further strides in collaboration and IT asset optimization to ensure they keep pace with today's dynamic and complex landscape and drive IT value long-term.