45 IT Asset Management Statistics for 2026

IT asset management (ITAM) is the process of tracking, managing, and optimizing every hardware, software, and cloud asset across an organization’s IT environment. Most ITAM failures share a root cause with organizations managing what they believe they own, not what actually exists. Software licenses stack up in procurement systems while half go unused in production. Hardware gets decommissioned off the books but keeps drawing power. Cloud resources spin up on demand and never spin down, and shadow IT runs at a scale most IT teams never see.

Virima compiles the IT asset management statistics below to put numbers to that gap across software licensing, hardware, shadow IT, cloud spend, and security. See what organizations can recover when they close it.

How Large is the IT Asset Management Market?

Enterprise investment in ITAM is accelerating. That growth reflects how expensive undiscovered assets have become, and how visible that cost now is to finance and procurement leadership.

Stat 1. The IT asset management software market is valued at $2.22 billion in 2026 and is projected to reach $3.01 billion by 2031, at a CAGR of 6.28%. (Mordor Intelligence ITAM Market Report)

Stat 2. A separate market analysis puts ITAM software at $1.81 billion in 2024, expanding to $2.9 billion by 2032 at a 6.2% CAGR. (SNS Insider ITAM Market Report)

Stat 3. The hardware asset management market was valued at $30 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $72.58 billion by 2032, growing at an 11.7% CAGR, nearly double the rate of ITAM software. (Credence Research, Hardware Asset Management Market)

Stat 4. Global IT spending is forecast to reach $6.37 trillion in 2026, up 14.2% from 2025, Gartner’s third upward revision to this forecast in six months. (Gartner, July 2026)

Stat 5. Data center systems are Gartner’s fastest-growing IT spending category for 2026, projected to grow 62.5% to $822 billion as AI infrastructure investment accelerates. Software remains the second-fastest, growing 15.5% to $1.468 trillion. (Gartner, July 2026)

Stat 6. The average enterprise now spends $55.7 million annually on SaaS alone. That figure grew 8% year over year despite application counts staying flat. (Zylo 2026 SaaS Management Index)

Scale matters here, because larger IT spend means larger exposure when visibility gaps exist. IT asset management programs built on discovery-sourced asset data give finance and IT operations a defensible baseline, not a spreadsheet approximation. For CFOs and procurement directors, these numbers also frame the audit risk and budget recovery opportunity that comes from getting asset data right.

Software License Waste Statistics: What Enterprises Overspend

Software is where ITAM waste is most measurable. The data from Flexera and Zylo puts the cost into numbers that finance teams cannot ignore.

Stat 7. Only 36% of enterprises report having complete visibility into their technology estate, down from 43% the prior year. Visibility is declining while IT complexity, especially around AI, keeps growing. (Flexera 2026 State of ITAM Report)

Stat 8. Global software spending is forecast to reach $1.468 trillion in 2026, up 15.5% year over year. (Gartner, July 2026)

Stat 9. SaaS wasted spend rose 10% points year over year, and IaaS/PaaS rose 8 points, even as waste held steady or declined elsewhere in the IT estate. (Flexera 2026 State of ITAM Report)

Stat 10. 59% of organizations report that wasted AI software spend has increased year over year, as AI features get bundled into existing licenses faster than usage tracking can keep up. (Flexera 2026 State of ITAM Report)

Stat 11. 44% of organizations spent more than $1 million on software audits over the past three years, a figure Flexera describes as stagnant across its last three reports. (Flexera 2026 State of ITAM Report)

Stat 12. 5% paid $5 million to $10 million in software audits over three years, and 2% paid $25 million or more. Spending shifted toward the middle instead, up 11 percentage points at the $1 million to $2 million tier alone. (Flexera 2026 State of ITAM Report)

Stat 13. Microsoft audited 64% of surveyed organizations in the past three years, up from 50% in the prior report, remaining the most frequent enterprise software auditor on record. (Flexera 2026 State of ITAM Report)

Stat 14. ITAM teams now spend more time on software optimization than on anything else, 32% of their time, followed by audit response and audit allocation at 22% each. (Flexera 2026 State of ITAM Report)

Stat 15. The average company manages 305 SaaS applications, each a potential source of license waste or a compliance gap. (Zylo 2026 SaaS Management Index)

Stat 16. 79% of IT leaders encountered price increases at SaaS renewal in the past 12 months. (Zylo 2026 SaaS Management Index)

See how Virima builds IT asset management on discovery-sourced trusted runtime truth, so your license baseline reflects what is actually deployed, not what was last audited. When the audit figures above sound familiar, see how Virima simplifies IT asset management audits by tracking entitlements against actual installs instead of reconstructing them under deadline.

Shadow IT Statistics: The Hidden Asset Inventory

Shadow IT is an asset management problem before it is a governance problem. Every application deployed outside IT’s view is an asset without a lifecycle, a cost owner, or a security record.

Stat 17. Gartner surveyed 302 cybersecurity leaders in 2025 and found that 69% of organizations suspect or have evidence that employees are using prohibited public GenAI tools. (Gartner, November 2025)

Stat 18. Gartner predicts that by 2030, more than 40% of enterprises will face security or compliance incidents tied to unauthorized shadow AI. (Gartner, November 2025)

Stat 19. The average enterprise runs roughly 14 different AI tools, and IT teams are typically unaware of most of them. (Forbes Technology Council, August 2026)

Stat 20. 85% of organizations see gaps in IT visibility as a major risk, and nearly half don’t always know when employees are using AI tools. (Flexera 2026 AI Pulse Report)

Stat 21. 61% of organizations cut projects or initiatives due to unplanned SaaS cost increases. (Zylo 2026 SaaS Management Index)

Stat 22. 77% of IT leaders experienced unexpected costs that surfaced only after a SaaS contract was signed. (Zylo 2026 SaaS Management Index)

Shadow IT is hard to close because most ITAM programs build their inventory from procurement and finance records, which only capture what was purchased through official channels. Virima’s agentless and agent-based discovery finds what’s actually running on the network, including the applications and devices nobody filed a purchase order for.

Hardware Asset Management Statistics: What Goes Untracked

Software sprawl draws headlines, but hardware visibility gaps pose their own category of financial and security risks. Ghost hardware and the AI-driven surge in data center demand are both reshaping that risk, and neither shows up in the budget until it’s too late.

Stat 23. Ghost assets (hardware reported in financial records that no longer physically exists) account for an estimated 12 to 25% of fixed assets in most organizations. (OnPoint Service’s Ghost Asset Crisis report)

Stat 24. AI-optimized servers will account for 31% of total data center power consumption in 2026, up from roughly 20% in 2025, as compute-intensive AI workloads reshape data center demand. (Gartner, June 2026)

License and Cost Dimension of Hardware Sprawl

Stat 25. For IBM specifically, rightsizing virtual environments and using sub-capacity licensing is the top cost-saving tactic, while reducing physical cores and hosts running Oracle workloads leads to savings there. (Flexera 2026 State of ITAM Report)

Stat 26. Among advanced ITAM organizations, 94% report real savings from reusing licenses instead of buying new ones, the top-ranked cost-saving tactic for Microsoft and ServiceNow licensing specifically. (Flexera 2026 State of ITAM Report)

Stat 27. 78% of IT leaders report unexpected charges tied to consumption-based pricing or AI-feature billing in the past year, a new asset cost category that most ITAM programs have not yet built governance around. (Zylo 2026 SaaS Management Index)

IT discovery removes hardware blind spots. It scans across network-connected, cloud-hosted, and remote devices to produce an inventory your CMDB can trust instead of a list that goes stale between physical counts. Our hardware asset management guide covers the lifecycle tracking that catches ghost assets before they hit the books, and for a direct comparison of discovery-based ITAM against simpler scanning approaches, see our Lansweeper comparison.

Cloud Asset Sprawl and FinOps

Cloud spend is growing fast, and the waste inside it is growing just as quickly. Provisioned in seconds and forgotten in days, cloud resources become a cost problem the moment they leave IT’s field of view.

Stat 28. Organizations now waste an average of 29% of their cloud spend, up from 27% in 2025. Flexera describes it as the first year-over-year increase in cloud waste in five years, driven by surging AI workloads. (Flexera 2026 State of the Cloud Report)

Stat 29. Worldwide end-user spending forecast on public cloud services totaled $723.4 billion in 2025, up from $595.7 billion in 2024, a 21.5% increase. (Gartner, November 2024)

Stat 30. At the confirmed 29% waste rate on $723.4 billion in total cloud spend, the industry lost roughly $210 billion to unused or idle cloud resources in 2025. (Gartner 2024 cloud spend x Flexera 2026 waste rate)

Stat 31. 85% of organizations now say managing cloud spend is a top challenge. (Flexera 2026 State of the Cloud Report)

Stat 32. Spending on AI-native SaaS applications increased 108% year over year, creating a new asset category that most ITAM programs are not yet equipped to track or govern. (Zylo 2026 SaaS Management Index)

Stat 33. Optimizing software spend is now the priority for SAM teams, leading the next-highest priority by more than 19 percentage points, up over 9 points year over year. (Flexera 2026 State of ITAM Report)

Stat 34. 78% of organizations now have a dedicated FinOps team, and 97% of ITAM professionals carry at least some FinOps responsibility, both up sharply from the 38% ITAM-FinOps collaboration rate reported a year earlier. (Flexera 2026 State of ITAM Report)

Stat 35. Day-to-day interaction between ITAM and cloud or FinOps teams actually declined slightly year over year, even as formal reporting alignment between the two functions rose 5 percentage points, a sign that collaboration is becoming more structured rather than more frequent. (Flexera 2026 State of ITAM Report)

Cloud waste is a visibility problem before it’s a FinOps problem: a team can’t rightsize or reclaim what it doesn’t know exists. Virima’s cloud discovery pulls AWS and Azure resources into the same CMDB as on-premises assets, so FinOps and ITAM teams work from one inventory instead of reconciling two.

For organizations running a mixed environment, our hybrid cloud asset management guide covers how to keep that inventory current as workloads move between data center and cloud.

Security Exposure of Untracked Assets

Every undiscovered asset is an unpatched asset. Every application outside IT’s view is an unmonitored attack surface. The exposure data below shows exactly how much that visibility gap costs.

Stat 36. 74% of cybersecurity incidents occur because of unknown or ungoverned assets, making asset visibility a primary security control, not a compliance checkbox. (Trend Micro, April 2025: survey of 2,250 cybersecurity leaders)

Stat 37. Up to 90% of successful ransomware campaigns leverage unmanaged endpoints, often personal devices or forgotten hardware that sit outside standard patch management. (Gartner, via Microsoft)

Stat 38. 64% of employees admit to using unauthorized AI tools for work, a shadow AI problem most organizations lack the visibility to manage. Less than 30% of respondents believe their organization maintains an accurate software inventory, and nearly 40% say their company lacks full visibility into the applications employees actually use. (WatchGuard 2026 Cybersecurity Hygiene Report, via GlobeNewswire)

Stat 39. Complete IT visibility has declined 7 percentage points year over year, from 43% to 36%. AI is the sharpest blind spot within that decline as only 31% of organizations report accurate visibility into their AI software, even as nearly half now track AI as part of their software spend. (Flexera 2026 State of ITAM Report)

Stat 40. Adobe and Oracle both saw the sharpest audit-activity increases recently. Adobe rose from 24% to 32%, and Oracle newly surged from 24% to 38%, the steepest year-over-year swing of any vendor tracked. (Flexera 2026 State of ITAM Report)

Accurate asset data, sourced from active IT discovery, gives security teams the intelligence to assess blast radius before incidents happen, not after. For organizations building a CMDB that feeds security workflows, discovery-sourced data is the difference between a current asset registry and a stale spreadsheet.

If these ITAM statistics describe your environment, the next step is seeing what is actually running in it. Explore how Virima maps it, or schedule a 30-minute demo to see it against your environment.

ITAM ROI: What Better Visibility Returns

ITAM’s financial case sits in three places: license recovery, audit avoidance, and the operational efficiency gains from having accurate data in the tools your teams already use. A fourth is emerging fast, catching AI spend before it becomes waste.

Stat 41. Negotiating SaaS contract terms jumped 14 percentage points compared to 2025, as ITAM teams lean harder into renewal negotiation to control costs. (Flexera 2026 State of ITAM Report)

Stat 42. Reducing the number of licenses and downgrading licenses are the top two ways companies save on Microsoft, while reducing licenses alone is by far the most effective strategy for ServiceNow. (Flexera 2026 State of ITAM Report)

Stat 43. 45% of organizations are now actively identifying unsanctioned or shadow AI usage, turning visibility into an emerging cost-avoidance category as AI spend scales. (Flexera 2026 State of ITAM Report)

Stat 44. Across all four major vendors, rightsizing by reducing licenses ranks as the top savings lever for Microsoft and ServiceNow, second for Oracle, and third for IBM. (Flexera 2026 State of ITAM Report)

Stat 45. Organizations with a dedicated FinOps team, now 78% of the market, report measurable improvements in cost control, driven by a shared view of asset deployment and consumption data. (Flexera 2026 State of ITAM Report)

None of these gains require a new process but accurate inventory data flowing into the renewal and audit workflows teams already run. Virima’s discovery-sourced CMDB feeds that data automatically. Our guide on what ROI to expect from network and asset management software breaks down the same three-part case in more depth: cost avoidance, risk reduction, and efficiency gains.

Key Takeaways

Every number in this list, from ghost hardware to cloud waste to software audit exposure, traces back to the same problem. Organizations are managing what they believe they have, not what actually exists. Shadow IT persists because IT does not know what was deployed. License waste stays high because usage data does not reach procurement before renewals. Audits hit hard because entitlement records do not reflect current deployments. Cloud costs compound because provisioned resources are never matched against consumption data.

IT asset management built on discovery-sourced data closes that gap. When asset inventory comes from active IT discovery instead of manual entry, periodic scans, or fragmented procurement records, the picture is accurate to act on. As we cover in A CMDB Without Discovery Is Just a Database, that accuracy is what separates a live system of record from a static list. It feeds the CMDB, ViVID™ service map, and every downstream process that depends on knowing what exists.

If you are building the business case for ITAM investment, see how Virima’s IT discovery builds a defensible asset baseline. Schedule a demo with our team to learn more.

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