Almost any large company’s IT infrastructure inevitably accumulates an array of resources that have long ceased to service any relevant business processes and benefit the enterprise.
Forgotten virtual machines and their disks, reserved but unused IP addresses, various auxiliary services – all this continues to consume computing power.
Such ballast is formed for various reasons: after unfinished pilots, when changing responsible employees, when knowledge about the appointment of resources leaves with a person, during migrations between sites and regions, and also simply because the company has not built a procedure for the correct decommissioning of assets.
In reports, these losses are usually not visible – they dissolve into total costs. However, for the most part, they have a rather serious impact on the efficiency of using the IT budget and business opportunities for the development of new areas.
According to Flexera State of the Cloud Report 2025, with rising costs, the problem of overspending is increasingly felt – on average it is 17%, and up to 27% of spending is recognized as ineffective.
The problem is systemic – the business orders resources, IT provides them, the financial unit pays the bills, but none of the parties sees a complete picture of the service life cycle. Automating this lifecycle – from first requisition to decommissioning – turns opaque costs into a manageable expense item.
Where budgets flow
The fundamental problem with IT spending is that it tends not to be clearly detailed – and without automated accounting, it is impossible to track real resource consumption. Because of this, the company learns about overspending only after it was fixed, not being able to reduce costs in time.
Funds “leak” most often through several specific channels.
The first and largest of them are the so-called “zombie resources.” In fact, these are servers, virtual machines, network resources, applications that physically work, consume electricity and generate bills, but do not carry payloads. These can be test environments forgotten after the completion of the project, or previously allocated capacities for pilot projects that have not yet reached production. They arise precisely because of the lack of automated control at the decommissioning stage: when those responsible for services change without transferring knowledge, resources continue to work for months.
The second reason for overspending is chronic over-provisioning. According to the established practice, the capacity of the IT infrastructure is still often laid with some margin on peaks, which occur on the strength of two or three times a year. On their own infrastructure, such costs become frozen CAPEX, and in the case of any form of resource lease or the use of cloud services – bloated OPEX. And in both cases, such expenses do not bring any return to the enterprise. The problem is compounded by the fact that the business orders resources without understanding their real value, and IT does not see the business context of use.
The third channel of leaks is licensed ballast. Most often, costs are generated by services that continue to be paid, but are no longer used by employees. When licenses are bought “on growth” or by inertia are extended without analyzing the actual disposal, the company pays for functionality that no one uses.
The root of all these leaks is the same – the lack of system control at each stage of the resource’s existence. Automating the entire life cycle of resources, from requesting them to disposing of them, allows regaining this control and increasing the granularity of IT costs.
Financial performance points
Life cycle automation involves building end-to-end financial control at each stage of the existence of a particular resource.
Design and inquiry
The presence of automated catalogs of resources and services turns the process of requesting a resource into something like making a purchase in an online store. The user selects a configuration from a standardized list, each configuration optionally accompanied by an indication of the cost of the selected resource. A request negotiation may also be provided if the cost exceeds a predetermined threshold.
Deploy and scale
Manual deployment puts significant strain on personnel and increases the risk of human error. Modern automation platforms allow to customize the process of issuing resources so that after the application is approved, services are deployed automatically. At the same time, users are able to order and scale resources independently, and administrators are able to configure reconciliation business processes flexibly without in-depth technical knowledge.
Analytics and control
Dedicated resources require constant control – otherwise cost transparency will again elude the business. Real-time infrastructure analytics tools are used for this during the operational phase – this approach provides detailed control of consumption and allows to make decisions about optimization based on actual data.
Decommissioning
It also happens that the creation of resources in a company is automated, but their decommissioning remains a manual process, which is why this is often forgotten. Such resources can work in this mode for months or even years – after all, no one initiated their stop. At this stage, policies that monitor usage metrics and, when they decrease, signal this to the responsible person or start the shutdown procedure will help.
Automation – challenges and risks
Any automation is not only solutions, but also new challenges. And life cycle automation is no exception here.
The first and most critical of them is the automation of unsettled, chaotic processes. If the business processes of resource management (in particular, we are talking about request and approval) in the company are built incorrectly – for example, there are no owners of services, there is no financial responsibility of departments for consumption – then automation without revising these processes will not reveal its potential. First of all, it is necessary to build processes, and only then automate them.
The second challenge is the need to adapt IT staff. Automation inevitably changes the nature of the work of specialists. For example, engineers who have been involved in manual deployment for a long time will have to take on other tasks, such as designing, analyzing and developing systems. Of course, this will require an investment of time and a number of other resources – for example, investment in staff training.
The third challenge is the risk of patchwork automation. Companies often approach automation pointwise – they choose one tool for deployment, another for monitoring, a third for tracking costs, which is why, instead of end-to-end control, they get a set of disparate systems that are difficult to integrate with each other.
The solution to this problem is full-cycle platforms such as Clouden. They remove the need to “be friends” with different tools, offering a single interface for the entire life cycle of IT services. To solve the problem of manual management, internal customers receive a personal account, where administrators can flexibly configure any, even complex multi-component services, and users can order and scale them themselves.
To cover the risk of losing control over costs, BI analytics for real-time monitoring and automatic billing are built into such systems – the platform generates invoices, acceptance certificates and other financial documents based on real resource consumption.
In practice, each of these stages brings a certain measurable financial effect – from the gradual elimination of “zombie infrastructure” and licensed ballast to cost optimization through elastic resource consumption.
Together, this can significantly reduce direct IT costs in the first months after the introduction of automation.
Ultimately, life cycle automation changes not so much the processes as the culture of resource management. When each request is justified, each service is taken into account, and each decommissioning is controlled, IT ceases to be a “black box” for the business and becomes its full-fledged partner.
By Natalia Tsareva, Product Director, ISPsystem