Most IT leaders already know their asset management processes are imperfect. What they often don’t know is how expensive that imperfection actually is.
$21 million wasted annually on unused SaaS licenses. 43% of IT teams still using spreadsheets. 71% of departing employees not returning company devices. These aren’t edge cases from underfunded IT teams, they’re averages. And in 2026, with global IT spending crossing $6 trillion for the first time, the cost of getting ITAM wrong has never been higher.
This post pulls together the most important IT asset management statistics from leading analysts, Gartner, IDC, Flexera, Zylo, IBM, Verizon, and more organized by topic so you can find what’s relevant to your situation. There’s a lot here. That’s kind of the point.
The State of ITAM · 2026 Data Report
IT asset management has become a strategic function, not a spreadsheet.
Global IT spending crosses $6 trillion, hybrid work is now the default, and visibility keeps slipping even as budgets grow. Here is every number that explains why.
$6.15TGlobal IT spend forecast for 2026
43%Of IT teams report full asset visibility, down YoY
$21MAverage annual SaaS waste per organization
90%Of successful cyberattacks originate at an endpoint
01
The ITAM Market: Modest Core, Massive Ecosystem
The core ITAM software market grows steadily, not dramatically. What’s actually accelerating is everything ITAM feeds into: unified endpoint management, enterprise mobility, and cloud ITSM.
Growth rate by market segment (CAGR)
The core ITAM market is the slowest-growing piece of its own ecosystem
Unified Endpoint Mgmt
~24.5%
$2.09BCore ITAM market size in 2025, reaching $3.01B by 2031 at 6.28% CAGR.
Mordor Intelligence
$4.66BUnder a broader market definition, reaching $6.78B by 2030 at 7.7% CAGR.
The Business Research Company
$7–15BUnified endpoint management market, growing at 22 to 27% CAGR.
Industry estimates
$19–41BEnterprise mobility management market, growing at 18 to 24% CAGR.
Industry estimates
$7.3BProjected size of the software asset management market alone by 2029, at 16% CAGR.
MarketsandMarkets
$23BCloud ITSM market by 2031, where ITAM is the fastest-growing segment at 13.5% CAGR.
Industry estimates
63%Share of the ITAM market that is now cloud-based, a major shift from on-premise dominance.
Mordor Intelligence
34%Reduction in five-year operating costs from cloud ITAM deployments.
Flexera
36–40%Share of global ITAM revenue held by North America.
Industry estimates
7–16%CAGR for Asia-Pacific, the fastest-growing region, driven by digitization in India, Southeast Asia, and ANZ.
Industry estimates
44.5%Market share held by large enterprises, though SMEs are growing faster at 7.18% CAGR.
Mordor Intelligence
48%Of SMEs still lack a structured ITAM program at all, representing significant headroom in the market.
360 Research Reports
02
Hybrid Work Has Permanently Rewritten the Rules
The “will remote work stick” debate is over. Distributed work is now the default operating model, and it has a direct, measurable effect on asset visibility.
Where remote-capable employees actually work
Gallup, 2025, ~18,000 respondents
Hybrid — 52%
Fully remote — 26%
Fully on-site — 22%
1B
By 2030, the World Economic Forum projects 1 billion people will work remotely at least part-time. That’s the scale ITAM tools now have to serve, not a handful of road warriors with laptops.
88%Of U.S. employers now offer some form of hybrid work.
Robert Half, Q4 2025
64.4%Of enterprise-level organizations operate a hybrid workplace model.
Boundless HQ / Amply, 2025
97/100Of the Fortune 100 Best Companies support remote or hybrid arrangements.
Great Place to Work, 2025
43%Of IT teams report complete visibility across their technology environments, down from 47% the year prior.
Flexera 2025 State of ITAM Report
2.5Average number of devices workers now require for professional duties.
Industry data
87%Of companies provide laptops and equipment to remote workers.
Industry data
$1,800Average per-employee technology spend for remote work annually, nearly double the $950 figure in 2020.
Cisco
75%Of companies struggle to track IT assets in remote setups.
Velory, 2025
68%Of organizations cannot maintain a current hardware inventory after shifting to distributed teams.
Flexera
12–20%Annual IT overspend from duplicate purchases and underutilized resources without centralized asset tracking.
IDC
25%Reduction in operational costs from cloud-based ITAM tools.
IDC
274MGlobal PC shipments in 2025, up 4.1% year-over-year. Every unit needs tracking, securing, and eventual recovery.
IDC
03
IT Budgets: Where the Money Is (and Isn’t) Going
Budgets are up almost everywhere. But the growth is concentrated in security, AI, and cloud, not hardware, which keeps losing share of the pie.
$6.15T
Global IT spending is forecast to hit $6.15 trillion in 2026, up 10.8% from $5.54 trillion in 2025 (Gartner). IDC reports 2025 saw the fastest IT spending growth since 1996, at 14% year-over-year for hardware, software, and services.
Hardware’s shrinking share of the IT budget
Hardware keeps losing ground to cloud, software, and security even as total budgets grow
20202026
64%Of companies increased IT budgets for 2025; only 4% planned decreases.
Spiceworks, 8,800 respondents
77%Of CFOs planned to boost technology spending, with 47% targeting increases of 10% or more.
Gartner survey of 301 CFOs
62%Of SMBs raised IT budgets, the highest net-increase since 2021.
Spiceworks Ziff Davis
14.8%Share of SMB IT budgets allocated to cybersecurity in 2026, up from 10.2% in 2022. The top priority for the fourth straight year.
Techaisle
$213BGlobal cybersecurity spending in 2025, up 15% year-over-year.
Gartner
$1.5TGlobal AI spending in 2025, the fastest-growing budget category.
Gartner
2/3Of CIOs are investing in AI and ML for 2026.
Evanta / Gartner CIO Survey
31%Share of SMB IT budgets now going to cloud services, overtaking hardware as the single largest category in 2024.
Techaisle
17%Average amount by which cloud budgets exceed plans.
Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud
14.7%Annual growth of enterprise software spending, the fastest-growing IT segment, surpassing $1.4 trillion in 2026.
Gartner
$836BProjected device spending in 2026, growing just 6.1%, modest next to data center systems at $653B (+31.7%, driven by AI servers).
Gartner
22%Hardware’s share of SMB IT budgets in 2026, down from 33% in 2020.
Techaisle
04
Device Lifecycle: The Hidden Cost Problem
Buying the device is the easy part. Ghost assets, spreadsheet tracking, and offboarding failures quietly turn lifecycle management into a security and cost problem.
Ghost assets as a share of the fixed-asset register
Manual, spreadsheet-driven ITAM roughly doubles the ghost-asset problem
Manual / spreadsheet ITAM30%–45%
300–450Untracked “ghost” devices for a typical 1,000-device organization.
Serviceaide
43%Of IT teams still rely on spreadsheets as their primary asset tracking tool.
Serviceaide
88%Of those spreadsheets contain significant data errors.
Serviceaide
$100,000+Two in five organizations waste more than this annually just storing unused or obsolete IT devices.
Industry data
3–5 yrsTypical enterprise device refresh cycle.
Industry benchmark
53%More security incidents experienced by a 4-year-old PC versus one in its first year.
Wipro
71%Of organizations report their network assets are mostly aging or obsolete.
NTT
1.7B devicesMay need replacement as Windows 10 end-of-support hits, creating the largest coordinated device refresh in a decade.
Industry estimates
71%Of HR professionals report at least one departing employee failed to return company equipment.
Capterra
17%More likely that remote workers withhold devices compared to on-site staff.
Industry data
$900–$2,000Average cost per unreturned device in replacement alone, before data exposure.
Industry data
83% / 91%Of ex-employees retain access to company systems post-departure (83%), and still have access to company files (91%).
GroWrk
86%Of enterprises experienced a data breach in the past three years.
Blancco 2025 Report
17%Of those breaches were caused by redeployed devices that still contained sensitive data.
Blancco 2025 Report
42%Of used drives sold on secondary markets contained recoverable sensitive information.
Blancco / Ontrack
$35MMorgan Stanley’s SEC fine for mishandling data on improperly disposed servers, the cautionary tale of the category.
SEC
05
Global IT Procurement
Hiring across borders sounds simple until a laptop needs to clear customs with lithium battery restrictions. DaaS and zero-touch provisioning have emerged as the two big responses.
Device-as-a-Service and zero-touch provisioning: current vs. projected market size
Both models are scaling fast as organizations look to simplify cross-border procurement
Device-as-a-Service
2025 → 2034 · 21.3% CAGR
Zero-touch provisioning
2024 → 2032 · 11.1% CAGR
43%Of new hires wait more than a week for their workstation and tools to be ready.
Workwize
$8,000Average total IT onboarding cost per employee, accounting for hardware, software, IT labor, and productivity loss.
Workwize
29%Of employees quit within the first 90 days, often citing poor onboarding.
Industry data
2 vs 12 daysA laptop that ships in 2 days in London might take 12 days to reach Singapore.
Industry data
$262BProjected size of the Device-as-a-Service market by 2034, up from $43.8B in 2025, at 21.3% CAGR.
Fortune Business Insights
69%Share of zero-touch deployments accounted for by large enterprises, reflecting the infrastructure investment required to scale.
SNS Insider
06
SaaS Management: The Waste Nobody Wants to Talk About
SaaS sprawl has gone from an IT inconvenience to a multi-million-dollar management problem, and most of the spending doesn’t get used.
SaaS applications managed per organization
The count depends heavily on whether shadow IT is included
BetterCloud
Zylo, weighted
10,000+ employees
$21M
52.7% of purchased SaaS licenses sit idle, wasting an average of $21 million per year per organization, and up to $80.6 million for large enterprises (Zylo 2026 SaaS Management Index).
$284MAverage SaaS spend at organizations with 10,000+ employees, running 660 applications.
Zylo 2025
$4,830SaaS spend per employee, a 21.9% year-over-year increase, now about 30% of total IT budgets.
Industry data
12.2%SaaS inflation rate, roughly 4.5 times the rate of general inflation.
Vertice
79%Of IT leaders encountered price increases at their last SaaS renewal, with vendors hiking prices 9 to 25% in 2025.
Zylo 2026 / Gartner
26.1%Share of SaaS spend actually owned by IT, and just 15.9% of applications.
Zylo 2025
80%Of employees use SaaS applications without IT approval.
McAfee
#1 shadow appChatGPT has surged to become the #1 shadow IT application, and the #2 most-expensed app by employees.
Industry data
1/3Of data breaches now stem from shadow IT, at an average cost of $4.88 million each.
IBM 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report
61%Of organizations were forced to cut projects or initiatives due to unplanned SaaS cost increases.
Industry data
9%Share of IT budgets CIOs now set aside just to absorb price increases on existing SaaS services.
Gartner
07
Endpoint Security: Where ITAM Meets Cybersecurity
This is where asset management failures stop being abstract. Unmanaged endpoints are where most successful attacks start, and the cost is now specific enough to take to a CFO.
Average cost of a data breach
The U.S. average sits well above the global figure, and AI-driven automation meaningfully closes the gap
Global avg.
U.S. avg.
With AI savings
90%Of successful cyberattacks and 70% of data breaches originate at endpoint devices.
Verizon 2023 Mobile Security Index
84%Of cybersecurity professionals believe all attacks begin at an endpoint.
Dark Reading 2025
44%Of breaches involved ransomware, up 37% year-over-year, out of 12,195 confirmed breaches analyzed.
Verizon 2025 DBIR
46%Of compromised credential systems were unmanaged devices.
Verizon 2025 DBIR
92%Of ransomware attacks in 2024 involved unmanaged devices.
Industry data
$670KExtra average cost added by shadow AI breaches.
IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025
€7.1BCumulative GDPR fines since 2018, across 2,245 enforcement actions, with €1.2B issued in 2025 alone.
DLA Piper, January 2026
2.71xHigher cost of non-compliance versus maintaining compliance: $14.82M compared to $5.47M.
Ponemon Institute
63%Of organizations have implemented zero trust either partially or fully.
Gartner
96%Of organizations favor the zero trust approach, with 65% planning to replace VPN services within the year.
Zscaler ThreatLabz 2025
08
IT Automation and AI: The Efficiency Gap
The gap between what AI-powered IT operations can do and what most organizations are actually doing is still wide, but the ROI case is no longer in question.
Cost per support interaction
An AI chatbot resolution costs a fraction of a human-handled one
88%Of organizations report regular AI use in at least one business function, up from 78% a year prior.
McKinsey State of AI 2025
83%AI adoption rate specifically within the IT sector.
Mezzi
70%Of organizations projected to adopt structured automation by 2025, up from just 20% in 2021.
Gartner
$14.6BSize of the AIOps market, growing at 15 to 22% CAGR.
Grand View Research
76%Of CIOs expect their organizations to have invested in agentic AI by end of 2026.
Info-Tech, 738 IT decision-makers
248% ROIReported by Microsoft Power Automate users over three years, with payback periods under six months.
Forrester TEI Study
$3.50Average return generated for every $1 invested in AI implementations.
Industry data
55%Reduction in average first response time from AI-powered ITSM tools.
Freshworks 2025
45%+Of incoming support queries now deflected by AI agents.
Industry data
75%Maximum drop in resolution times seen in mature AI implementations.
Rezolve.ai
80% by 2027Gartner predicts agentic AI will autonomously resolve about 80% of common service issues by 2027, driving a 30% reduction in operational costs.
Gartner
09
IT Helpdesk: The Support Ticket Economy
This is often where asset management failures actually surface, and the numbers show why it’s such a drag on both IT teams and employees.
Cost per contact: self-service vs. assisted support
A roughly 7x cost advantage is driving the shift to self-service portals
10,675Average support tickets an organization handles per month, with 34% of teams reporting rising volumes year-over-year.
HDI State of Tech Support 2025
1.25xAverage number of times each user contacts the help desk per month.
HDI State of Tech Support 2025
21Average tickets resolved per agent per day.
HDI State of Tech Support 2025
$15.56Average cost per ticket, ranging from $2.93 to $49.69 depending on complexity.
MetricNet
€160 / incidentFully-loaded cost per IT incident once productivity loss is included, based on an average of 3 hours 12 minutes of lost employee time.
HappySignals 2025, 2.27M responses
$70Cost in IT labor for a single password reset.
Forrester
68.5%Share of service desk budgets that goes to staffing, versus just 9.3% to technology.
MetricNet
81%Of enterprises report a significant shift toward self-service portals.
Forrester 2024
50%Of service issues that AI-powered self-service can now handle without human involvement.
Supportbench
1:108The IT-to-employee staffing ratio, a 31.4% year-over-year increase.
BetterCloud
78%Of IT workers say helpdesk ticket volumes have increased due to flexible working.
Deel
41%Of cyberattacks in 2025 targeted remote or hybrid workers.
UK NCSC
10
What 2026 Looks Like for ITAM
Three forces are landing at roughly the same time, and none of them are optional: a hardware refresh cliff, ITAM’s merger with security operations, and an entirely new category of AI-native tools.
1.7B devicesThe Windows 10 end-of-support cliff is forcing the largest coordinated device refresh in a decade.
Industry estimates
+108% YoYAI-native SaaS spending surged this much in 2025, creating a category of tools employees are adopting faster than IT can log them.
Zylo 2026
$38.86BSize of the Green IT services market in 2026, growing at nearly 20% CAGR.
Mordor Intelligence
62M tonnesE-waste generated in 2022, rising five times faster than documented recycling.
UN Global E-waste Monitor
How ZenAdmin Addresses These ITAM Challenges
The numbers above point to the same problems repeatedly: devices going missing, SaaS budgets nobody fully controls, new hires waiting on laptops, ex-employees retaining access they shouldn’t have, and IT teams stretched too thin to do much about any of it. ZenAdmin is built for distributed teams dealing with exactly this combination.
On the device lifecycle side, ZenAdmin handles procurement across 150+ countries with an average lead time of 5 working days, zero-touch deployment, and offboarding automation that wipes and retrieves devices when employees leave. Given that 71% of HR professionals report equipment going unreturned, having retrieval built into the workflow rather than added to a checklist makes a real difference.
On the SaaS and access side, ZenAdmin’s SaaS Management module surfaces complete app visibility including shadow IT, with provisioning and deprovisioning tied to HRIS events. The organizations losing $21 million annually in unused SaaS licenses tend to have exactly the kind of fragmented visibility that centralized usage tracking fixes.
On the support side, ZenAdmin’s IT Helpdesk provides 24/7/365 L1 and L2 support with a guaranteed 15-minute response SLA, delivered directly into Slack or MS Teams. It handles up to 90% of L1 and L2 tickets without human involvement, which, given the staffing ratios above, is probably more useful than hiring.
If you’re dealing with any of the above, book a demo with ZenAdmin to see how it handles them in practice.
24 July, 2026
