IT asset management (ITAM) is far from a simple task. What were once simple infrastructures made up of on-premises hardware and legacy solutions have now exploded into a labyrinth of assets that becomes increasingly more challenging to monitor and govern.
In the 2025 Spotlight Paper, IDC combines expert research and survey responses from IT leaders to examine the ongoing challenges of ITAM, including:
- Disconnected software license management
- Poor visibility into cloud and virtual assets
- Siloed information sharing across teams
- Staff and time constraints
The unchecked growth of shadow IT
All of this hinges on having accurate, complete asset data–which in and of itself can be a challenge for many enterprises.
In this blog, we’re going through the five most common IT asset management challenges organizations face today, and why every one of them traces back to the same root cause: the Trust Gap between fragmented asset records and the decisions that depend on them.
1. Software License Access Remains Disconnected
Essentially, every IT team has struggled with managing software licenses.
That’s often because:
- Organizations are paying for multiple licenses that employees are not actually using.
- Different functions pay for the same license at different price points.
- Teams go around IT and purchase software licenses that don’t meet compliance standards.
In some cases, IT may not have any insight into software license usage because they lack updated data about who is using what. As time goes on, duplicate license purchases and inefficient usage inflate budgets and cost enterprises thousands in wasted resources.
To regain control, IT leaders limit the number of licenses they allow other teams to access. Although well-intentioned, this choice negatively impacts employees who need those tools to efficiently do their jobs. As teams wait for IT to release licenses, workflows slow down, putting a strain on productivity.
2. Cloud and Virtual Assets Are Hard to Track
IDC reports that many IT leaders face major challenges in governing cloud and virtual assets, improving visibility into cloud environments, and maintaining strong control over their security. Teams are concerned that container and cloud assets can fall outside traditional ITAM processes and leave them with unprotected blind spots.
Gone are the days of more easily tracking physical devices that permanently stay inside your offices. Hybrid work environments require IT teams to support virtual tools like cloud storage solutions that employees can access remotely.
So now the question becomes: How do I govern cloud and virtual assets with confidence?
3. Information Sharing is Still Siloed
IDC's 2025 IT Asset Management Survey found that 33% of surveyed IT leaders ranked sharing asset information with other related functions and teams as a top challenge. That number reflects what happens when asset data isn't trusted enough to share. When IT, Finance, and Security each maintain their own version of asset reality, your organization cannot act on a single source of truth.
Procurement requires asset usage data to forecast devices and prevent overbuying. Finance needs it to monitor IT budgets and optimize cost savings. Security relies on that data to identify and reduce risks related to individual assets. The list goes on.
What causes information silos in IT asset management? Often, it's a combination of legacy systems that don't communicate, different teams using separate tools, and a lack of standardized data formats across departments.
When asset data stays siloed, there is no way for the organization to maintain consistent, accurate data. Each team may have something different.
This results in:
- Delayed communication about IT assets
- Uncoordinated purchases
- Overbuying and overrun budgets
- Widening security and compliance gaps
- A lack of audit-readiness
4. Staff and Time Constraints Are a Persistent Strain
As organizations use more devices for more activities, the teams in charge of your entire IT asset landscape can easily become overwhelmed. Employees have only so much time to discover, track, and manage countless hardware, cloud storage platforms, firewall networks, and software assets. For leaner teams that lack sufficient headcount, things are almost guaranteed to fall through the cracks.
How do I manage ITAM with limited staff and time? The answer lies in automation and strategic prioritization.
Without enough staff to effectively support IT asset management, organizations using manual asset management processes can expect to see:
- Incomplete asset inventories
- Inaccurate IT asset data
- Increased risk of security issues
- Growing noncompliance
- Poor resource allocation
- Missed business opportunities
As a result, ITAM becomes reactive, focused on putting out fires, rather than proactive, planning for strategic improvement.
5. Shadow IT Continues to Grow
These challenges increase concerns about “shadow IT,” technology acquired or used outside IT's governance framework that expands the asset footprint without ownership, lifecycle accountability, or audit traceability.
While many employees might not see the harm in downloading one-off files for collaboration tools or using personal emails on work devices, IT knows just how dangerous these “small” actions can be to the enterprise.
All of the unauthorized purchases and untracked assets that fall under shadow IT not only open up your business to glaring security and data breach concerns, but they also contribute to rising costs and wasted budgets.
Without a way to address non-IT-approved purchases and bring untracked assets back into view, this issue can spiral and derail everything IT works to protect within the enterprise.
Clean, Normalized Asset Data is the Common Denominator
Every ITAM challenge described here shares the same upstream cause: organizations have invested in systems meant to manage their technology without ever solving the data trust problem those systems depend on.
CMDBs inherit poor hygiene. ITSM platforms reflect what should exist, not what does. Finance has no reliable line of sight to the technology investment at all.
The result is a Trust Gap that quietly drains budgets, complicates audits, weakens security, and stalls the AI and automation initiatives that leadership is counting on.
Before IT teams can govern assets, control costs, or support strategic initiatives like AI and automation, they need a reliable foundation of accurate, real-time asset data.
Closing those gaps using trustworthy asset data does much more than simply maintain an inventory.
Respondents to IDC’s IT Asset Management Survey, and forward-thinking IT leaders, have a clear understanding of the role that reliable asset data plays in driving business continuity, cost control, and automation.
Organizations that have solved this foundation via modern ITAM consistently report measurable improvements across several areas:
- Application and site reliability, which directly impacts employee productivity
- Faster mean time to detection and resolution, lowering the cost and disruption of incidents
- Stronger security posture that prevents downtime and improves data protection
- Better cost controls as a result of tracking asset and software spend against projects and initiatives
- Optimized budget allocation through informed financial forecasting
- Effective automation processes that reduce manual work
IDC’s conversations also acknowledge the impact that accurate data has for AI implementation. Automated agents can handle asset discovery, reconciliation, and alerts, but only when the underlying data they rely on is trustworthy. Inaccurate or incomplete asset records will produce unreliable AI outputs regardless of the sophistication of the model.
Accurate, real-time IT asset data acts as the cross-functional connective tissue between IT operations, financial management, and business strategy. Only by unifying your data into a single source of truth can you overcome common challenges and drive value.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is IT asset management (ITAM)?
IT asset management is the discipline of governing every technology investment–hardware, software, SaaS, and cloud–across its full lifecycle. Done well, ITAM means every asset has an accurate record, a clear owner, a measurable cost, and a defensible audit trail. Done poorly, it means fragmented records, uncontrolled spend, and decisions made on data nobody fully trusts.
Why is cloud asset management harder than managing physical hardware?
Physical hardware has a purchase order, a serial number, and a location. Cloud and virtual assets are more abstract than that. They're onboarded, modified, and decommissioned without triggering traditional procurement or inventory workflows.
That means they often exist outside the governance framework entirely, creating blind spots in cost accountability, compliance posture, and security ownership.
How can automation improve ITAM without requiring a larger team?
Automation in ITAM works when the underlying asset data is trustworthy and fails when it isn't. When the data foundation is accurate and continuously reconciled, policy-driven automation can handle onboarding, offboarding, license reclamation, access reviews, and renewal workflows without manual intervention.
The result is governance that scales without adding headcount and processes that are consistent enough to be audit-ready by default.
Oomnitza’s Asset-Centric Approach to ITAM
While IT leaders can have a vision for accessing accurate, normalized asset data with full lifecycle context, Oomnitza makes that a reality.
We provide a single pane of glass for all your technology assets to close the Trust Gap by:
- Collecting and normalizing data through 1,500+ turnkey connectors and REST API integrations
- Identifying assets from non-IT purchases to limit shadow IT
- Writing back to other systems, like security, HR, and finance, to unsilo asset data
- Leveraging no-code workflows to automate tasks
Our approach not only delivers the full lifecycle governance that cross-functional teams need to transform digital operations, but we also provide the clarity to combat the challenges of traditional IT asset management and turn your technology into a strategic advantage with more than 98% accuracy.
Download the full IDC Spotlight Paper to learn where your peers are seeing the greatest need for stronger IT asset data.
