The business risks of scaling back ITAM Managed Services

The pressure is real and the logic is understandable. A CIO or CFO told to reduce IT costs quickly will look for savings that are visible, immediate, and structurally straightforward.

ITAM and SAM managed services can tick all three boxes. A sizeable line item with no layoffs, no system shutdowns, and no obvious day-one disruption. They reside on a contract, often with a termination-for-convenience clause. Cutting them or drastically reducing them delivers a number that leadership can see right away.

While the temptation is clear, for many organisations cutting back on ITAM support is a miscalculation. We’ve seen clients cancel services to run them in-house at a lower cost, only to find it’s a false economy. While they found initial savings, over time, costs and risks spiralled to a point that they had to reengage the service.

If your organisation is considering streamlining any managed service, it’s important to properly weigh the costs against the benefits. That starts with having a clear picture of what the service brings to the table.

The temptation to cut services

Usually, organisations don’t cancel managed services because they think they can do it better, but because they believed they could achieve “good enough” without the recurring bill.

Some leaders also feel they gain more control by bringing the work in-house. They may plan to hire one or two ITAM or SAM specialists, absorb the responsibilities across existing teams, or buy ad hoc consulting if something urgent comes up.

What they actually find was that they had underestimated the effort and expertise required to navigate the complexities of third-party software today.

On paper, it looks like an easy win. But as the organisations that have reengaged our services can attest, in practise it can create costly gaps, spiralling costs, and unforeseen security issues.

What you lose with DIY ITAM

While the instinct to establish internal ownership is not wrong in principle, it can only work when the organisation has the right expertise, capacity, tooling, governance, and continuity in place.

These requirements, however, are getting more difficult to fulfil. It’s estimated that software now accounts for 23% of IT global spending and IT cost management practises have evolved to meet increased demands. It now spans SaaS, cloud, hybrid environments, FinOps, security alignment, procurement integration, audit defence, tooling administration, data quality and lifecycle governance. Licencing models are changing, publisher terms are becoming more complex, and AI, cloud and subscription pricing add further layers.

Before managed services became common, accountability for software asset management was often fragmented across IT, procurement, finance, security, and operations. Managed services brought structure, coordination, and a single point of ownership.

When that structure is removed, the work does not go away. It scatters. Tasks fall between teams. Issues linger unresolved. Risk accumulates in unused licences still being paid for, in utilisation surpassing entitlement coverage, in renewals that are not optimised, and in data quality that degrades over time.

A capable ITAM/SAM hire can help, but one person, or a small team, cannot realistically maintain deep expertise across every major publisher, platform, audit scenario and licencing change. A managed service provides access to licencing specialists, engineers, architects, tooling experts and audit practitioners who have handled these issues across many environments.

IT cost management and risk need to be addressed holistically, and managed services are much better equipped to provide this coverage. The Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SAM managed servicesⁱ summarises the indispensable capabilities they offer: "Delivered by skilled resources and leveraging the provider’s expertise, intellectual property (IP), rigour and best practises, SAM managed services address the gap in available SAM and FinOps skills, enable scalability and enhance maturity. At the same time, they deliver day-to-day SAM and FinOps activities and oversee the full life cycle."

Why continuous governance beats emergency support

Some organisations consider a middle path: cut the ongoing managed service and bring in consultants only when something critical happens – an audit, a major renewal, a cloud migration, or a merger. It sounds pragmatic, but it has limits.

Internal teams cannot easily scale during high-pressure events. An audit from a major software publisher can arrive with little notice. A licencing change from a major vendor can affect the entire estate overnight. A merger or acquisition can double the complexity of the software portfolio in a matter of weeks.

Managed services provide surge capacity and continuity that is hard to recreate on demand. Ad hoc consulting, by contrast, is typically more expensive per engagement, takes longer to mobilise, and starts without the institutional knowledge that a continuous team already holds.

And there is another dimension that is easy to overlook. Poor visibility into software estates can mean outdated, unsupported, or unpatched software remains in production. End-of-life applications that have not been updated in years become potential security liabilities.

Software Asset Management does not replace cybersecurity tools. But it provides a layer of visibility that endpoint protection and threat detection platforms may not cover: identifying what software is running, whether it is still supported, and whether it should still be there at all. That makes ITAM and SAM part of broader technology governance and risk management, not just a cost-control exercise.

Questions to ask before cutting ITAM managed services

The decision to cancel these services therefore deserve more scrutiny than a simple line-item review. Rather than asking only: "How much can we save by cutting this service?", leaders should consider a fuller set of questions:

• What percentage of our IT budget is software, and how is that changing?
• Who will own this work if the managed service is removed and do they have the capacity?
• Are we able to staff this initiative with experienced ITAM or SAM personnel that can manage licencing, tooling, governance, FinOps, audits, and data quality across every major publisher and platform?
• Can our team scale during an audit, merger, migration, renewal, or security event?
• What would it cost to rebuild this capability later if we need it?
• What risks are we accepting and are they visible to finance and leadership?

Only if you can answer these with certainty and if it’s clear that you have the skills and capacity to succeed should you consider going it alone. In our experience, many organisations struggle.