Wasting money on useless tech? Cut costs by preventing sprawl

Do you have a complete and updated record of your company's entire tech stack?

Even if you make an effort to keep this register complete, you likely have a colleague who is right now introducing yet another service to this extensive list.

According to Zylo, companies add six new apps to their tech stack every 30 days on average. This means that mid-sized companies have about 255 apps, while enterprises handle as many as 664 apps in their stacks.

Continuing this practice means that you probably have a pile of forgotten software and licenses that just keeps growing.

This puts unnecessary pressure on your budget and makes your whole data system exponentially more vulnerable. It also makes your employees' work harder, while it's meant to do just the opposite.

Luckily, there are strategies and tools, like computer monitoring software, that can help you reclaim control over your tech stack and make it work for you again.

What Is Tech Sprawl?

Tech sprawl, or IT sprawl, is the accumulation of apps, SaaS accounts, different digital tools, and licenses due to the lack of centralized supervision.

This is a consequence of the modern work style where everyone searches for a quick solution to a problem at hand. People rarely consider long-term effects, usually because they haven't been educated about them.

This practice can have deep negative effects on the whole company's well-being.

Forms of Tech Sprawl

Tech sprawl can take different forms:

• SaaS Sprawl: SaaS sprawl happens when an individual employee or a team finds a SaaS solution that fits their current operational needs. They often don't ask for approval or communicate their plans to the higher-level management when signing up for these services.
• As the company develops, departments or the company choose software solutions that serve the same purpose. This is when overlaps in SaaS functionalities occur, and the number of apps in use starts outgrowing the management capacity of the IT department.
• Shadow IT: This form of IT sprawl is similar to SaaS sprawl—they are proliferated by the lack of communication between IT and other teams. Shadow IT develops as individuals or teams start using unauthorized software instead of company-approved tools for the same purpose. This happens because either the IT department account approval procedures take too long or employees prefer using the software they are already familiar with.
• License Sprawl: Companies can often misjudge the number of necessary licenses for a certain software service. This can happen due to a desire to accommodate growth or due to poor forecasting and it's called license sprawl. If the company doesn't regularly check its tech stack, many licenses quickly go unused or underutilized, and lead to further financial loss.

What's Behind IT Sprawl?

IT sprawl is inevitable. It is a byproduct of the fast growth of cloud-based software and spurred by the workers' need to be more efficient. Many circumstances escalate it, and here are the major ones:

Rise in Popularity

As their number and functionalities grew, digital services became more popular among knowledge workers. Ease of use just made the expansion faster.

Easy Access

Earlier versions of the software were usually sold as hard copies and had to be installed onto devices. This was sometimes tricky, so the IT department had to be included. As software services are now cloud-based and user-friendly, the majority of workers don't need to ask for help from the IT department. This is how these tools go undetected by the company.

Lack of Centralized Software Purchase Process

Many companies allow department managers or team leaders to make software purchases themselves. The lack of communication between these employees and the absence of prescribed procedures creates tech sprawl.

Poor Company Culture & Lack of Training

If a company doesn't listen to employee needs and suggestions regarding the introduction of new work tools, employees are left to their own devices. This is what makes an ideal environment for IT sprawl. Each employee will sign up for or download a digital tool that looks good to them. Without proper training by consultation with the IT department, they can end up using wrong or even malicious software.

Using Private Devices for Work

Some companies don't provide work devices for their employees. This policy makes plenty of room for tech sprawl and cyber attacks on the company's systems.

On one side, your employees are more likely to keep using their own tools, even if the company provides a set of more efficient and safer tools. On the other, services they use in their free time on the same devices can easily get hacked and put your company data in danger.

Urgent Tasks

Sometimes, the approval process for a certain company-provided software takes too long. The company may not even have in the tech stack the software an employee needs. When an employee is in a race against time to finish a project, they will usually go over the IT department's heads. They will find a tool that looks like it can help them quickly, disregarding the company's safety rules if you have set up any.

4 Major Ways Tech Sprawl Damages Your Company & Budget

IT sprawl may start out as an inconvenience, but over time it develops into a serious problem affecting everything from security and employee communication to finances:

1. Security & Compliance Risks

As the number of applications grows, so does the risk of security breaches. A study by IDG Connect found that 52% of IT decision-makers cite data silos between IT operations and security as the major hurdle for accomplishing data protection compliance. Due to a large number of unused licenses and accounts still linked to the company's system, finding the suspicious asset is challenging. Only 30% of organizations manage to quarantine it within a day.

2. Integration Challenges

When digital tools are adopted without a plan, it often leads to a pile of disparate and overlapping services. Over time, the costs of IT support can easily pile up, and the lack of integration options between the tools inevitably leads to workflow disruptions. This lack of integration between systems can also cause 49% of software projects to exceed their budgets, leading to significant overruns​.

3. Productivity Dips

Each new app in the company's tech stack means another tool that employees need to get used to, log into, remember the password for, etc. It is estimated that an average knowledge worker switches between different digital tools 1,200 times in a workday. This results in as many as four hours of lost productivity time in a workweek for each employee. If it turns out that the new app isn't useful, it becomes another digital distraction, which further adds to the productivity loss.

4. Increased Operational Costs

An unused software license is money thrown away. While small businesses can create significant tech sprawl for their scope of work, it is the corporations that spend the most on unused software. At least 30% of their tech stack is estimated to be of little or no value to the organization. If you run a company like this, you can even waste around $104 million annually on forgotten licenses.

How to Resolve Tech Sprawl & Cut Down on Expenses & Distractions

Eliminating IT sprawl in your company starts with identifying its extent. Then come the next steps that revolve around identifying the best and necessary software solutions and cutting down on all underused ones that are eating away at your budget.

Software for monitoring remote employees can help you with your streamlining efforts. Here is where to start:

Identify the Weakest Links

The weakest links within your tech stack are the tools that have the most unused accounts or the ones with the poorest performance. All these lingering accounts are individual gateways into your system that hackers can use.

This is why your first step should be identifying all underused apps. You can do this by surveying your employees, but this is a time-consuming process. Relying on software like Insightful to help you monitor remote workers and their computers is a quick way to do this.

Thanks to its web and app tracking feature, this tool can track how frequently each software solution is used by your employees. With this automatically collected and displayed data, you can easily decide which services to eliminate immediately to easily reduce tech sprawl.

This software also enables you to detect all security issues in a blink of an eye. It identifies unusual behaviors or potential security threats and momentarily notifies the responsible personnel so they can react. This way, you ensure that your new core tech stack is safe around the clock.

In addition, this tool also ensures compliance with industry standards like HIPAA, SOC 2, and GDPR. By providing robust security features and audit trails in one platform, organizations can avoid using separate security and compliance tools, further reducing tech sprawl.

Centralize Your Tech Stack Management

Unplanned adoption of digital tools that are incompatible with each other creates confusion and collaboration issues. You can avoid the consequent workflow disruptions by setting up some new rules. Introduce a policy that every new license has to be assessed and approved by the IT department.

However, this job cannot be done manually. To tackle and prevent tech sprawl, you will need to find a way to manage the new tools and audit the old ones.

The most effective way to do this is to rely on employee computer monitoring software, such as Insightful. This software integrates with over 50 popular digital tools. In other words, you will be able to track the majority of your existing and future tech stack within one platform. Automatic reports about the usage of each tool will make it easier to make the right decisions about canceling licenses and avoiding overspending.

In addition, this software package also contains time and attendance monitoring software, a screen monitoring tool, etc. so its versatility will help you reduce tech sprawl even further.

As a result, companies save both time and money on software licensing, maintenance, and training, further contributing to operational efficiency.

Create Pro-Productivity Core Tech Stack

Tech sprawl can seriously drain employees' focus. Having dozens of passwords to remember and getting notifications from unuseful applications distracts employees from their tasks.

But how do you discern between the really useful tools and those that are focus killers?

A powerful productivity management tool like Insightful can help you identify the way each of the apps in your tech stack affects the productivity of your employees. This software tracks how and how often each software is used, as well as how they affect the workflow. It detects each productivity dip or spike and ties it to its source so you can make informed decisions.

Wondering how to know if remote employees are working and using the right software? This productivity tracking tool acts as office-based and work-from-home employee monitoring software. In other words, it provides you with detailed insights into your employees' workflow, habits, and apps used regardless of their location.

All this data can help you eliminate distracting apps and provide more room for focused work for your employees.

This software package also consolidates key productivity and performance metrics into one platform, providing a unified view of data. That helps eliminate the need for multiple analytics tools and platforms, reducing the number of software solutions used for reporting and analysis.

Get Your Tech Stack & Budget in Balance

Underused or completely redundant tools are not only a great risk for your data safety, but also put immense strain on your budget.

A software utilization tracker can help you identify superfluous tools within your tech stack and eliminate them. Insightful is one of these trackers, and it provides you with detailed reports on software usage. Thanks to this data, you can align your tech resources with the actual needs of your organization and reduce overall tech sprawl.

Additionally, this tool can also help you improve the adoption of the new tools you consider important. For example, apps like password managers can improve your company's cyber security greatly. However, your employees may be reluctant to start using them. A software utilization tracker can help you track the level of a software's usage and start an initiative to increase the number of employees that actively use it.

Thanks to these features, a software utilization tracker can help you reach balance—avoid tech budget deficit and get the most out of your centralized tech stack.

Conclusion

Software sprawl may seem harmless at first, but the longer you let it "flourish", the greater and more complex the danger it poses for your whole business.

Software utilization tools, like Insightful, can help you protect your data, consolidate your tech budget, and cut digital distractions from every employee's workday. Start your free trial today and put an end to tech sprawl with minimum effort and expenses!