Digital transformation is barreling ahead, with companies pouring trillions into the infrastructure, connectivity, and tools that power it. That money comes from one of two places: bigger budgets or better optimization. We all want the latter, but as strategies get more complex so does technology expense management – creating the perfect breeding ground for creeping mobility, cloud, and telecom costs.
Here are six you may be overlooking, and how to reign them in to reclaim budget.
Mobility Tool Sprawl
Decentralized decisions, mergers and acquisitions, emergency deployments that are never rolled back…tool sprawl is part of the natural gravity of business. Research shows that nearly half of enterprises are juggling three or more Mobile Device Management (MDM) platforms and more than 70% are running multiple Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) tools.
That complexity costs big time:
- Training & support: Every extra tool means hours of onboarding and troubleshooting, multiplied across teams.
- Integration work: Each platform needs to connect with other systems like identity management, security frameworks, and reporting dashboards.
- Policy duplication: Security and compliance rules have to be updated across every tool – password policies, encryption, access controls, data retention, you name it. The more platforms you run, the more duplication and risk.
- Visibility gaps: Fragmented systems = fragmented insight = missed opportunities to optimize.
- Risk exposure: More platforms mean more potential vulnerabilities. As we all know, a breach or failed audit can cost exponentially.
Without centralized visibility into usage, performance, and spend, these intangible costs remain cloaked.
What to do: Bring mobility costs, usage, and contracts into one view, making it clear where overlap exists and where consolidation can unlock savings. Real-time data synchronization is critical for flagging duplicate systems when they pop up, enabling leaders to act fast and counter the pull.
BYOD “Savings”
When Bring-your-own-device (BYOD) is set up and governed the right way, it offers flexibility and cost benefits. But when stipends, shadow devices, and security risks aren’t managed, potential savings turn into extra effort and hidden spend. This isn’t to say BYOD is a bad move, it just requires stronger guardrails.
Here are the blind spots you need to pay attention to.
Stipends that don’t match real costs
Flat stipends are meant to simplify expenses, but spend creeps when they don’t reflect the true cost of devices and plans. Employees either expense the difference elsewhere or IT shoulders more support requests, multiplying across the workforce.
Inconsistent security enforcement
Personal devices make it harder to enforce encryption, passwords, and app restrictions consistently. Each gap adds cost in the form of IT labor, remediation, compliance risk, or even fines – which is why 65% of organizations say corp-liable is more secure.
Shadow BYOD
Even with policies in place, employees connect personal devices without oversight. Tracking them down and closing the security gaps takes time, tools, and effort that rarely show up on the budget but impact the bottom line.
What to do: Track BYOD usage against actual business costs. Are stipends fair? Are unmanaged devices sneaking onto networks? Make it a top priority to gain better visibility and control over employee-owned devices.
AI Off the Grid
Artificial intelligence: everyone wants to use it, but it’s complicating cloud costs for 82% of enterprises. The problem isn’t just that GPUs and LLM queries are expensive (although that’s true). It’s that AI usage largely runs outside normal governance processes. Spend often isn’t tracked against cost centers, leading to surprise bills, underutilized GPU clusters, or API calls piling up with no accountability. IT and finance teams need deep visibility into AI usage and spend to keep innovation from becoming unchecked cost.
What to do: Tag and track AI workloads from the start, separate GPU and API costs from general cloud usage, and attribute AI costs back to teams or initiatives for accountability. Don’t forget to use forecasting and anomaly detection to flag unexpected AI spend before it adds up. Did you know?
Did you Know
Earlier this year, the FinOps Framework expanded to include AI – giving IT, finance, and other key stakeholders a blueprint to bring the same structure, accountability, and visibility to AI just like any other cloud expense. A FinOps-certified platform like Tangoe One does the legwork for you, purpose-built to optimize AI costs in line with proven FinOps practices.
Commitment Discounts
Commitment discounts promise big savings. You may have debated whether it’s worth it. Maybe you’re already locked in. Either way, you can take smart steps to protect your IT budget.
What to do: Gain deep visibility. With clear data on how workloads behave, you can decide which discounts to sign up for, how much to commit, and where to leave flexibility. If you’re already committed, visibility and insight become the steering wheel that turns a lock-down into something more manageable.
- Real-time monitoring shows where discounts are underutilized so you can shift workloads or modify terms to close the gap.
- Usage insights help match the right jobs to committed resources, catching anomalies early before costs spiral.
- Analyzing today’s performance sharpens tomorrow’s strategy, giving you the data to negotiate future commitments with expert precision.
Tangoe’s Advisory Services offer expert support. Our technology consultants helped one customer, a leading manufacturer, save $250,000 by aligning long-term commitment discounts with their cloud infrastructure strategy.
Telecom Contracts on Auto-pilot
Telecom contracts are notorious for evergreen clauses – agreements that auto-renew year after year. What doesn’t renew is the pricing, which means you can be stuck paying outdated rates that no longer reflect current benchmarks. If your contracts haven’t been touched in two or three years, chances are you’re already paying above market.
The reverse can also happen. When service pricing climbs during your contract term, renewals bring sudden hikes that blow up budgets. Optimizing rates in either scenario requires proactive negotiation. Tangoe recently helped a large U.S. utility do just that. We renegotiated three telecom contracts to save $2.7M over three years while holding pricing steady on hundreds of POTS lines despite industry-wide increases.
What to do: Go through all your telecom contracts to uncover auto-renewal clauses. When you’re ready to start benchmarking costs and negotiating, our ultimate guide walks you through step-by-step. Or, bring in outside experts. Tangoe’s negotiation artists leverage insights from $34B in tech spend to land the best deals with competitive prices, favorable terms, and optimized rates.
Invoice Disputes Under the Rug
About 9% of all telecom invoices have billing errors, leading to billions in waste globally. IT teams are already stretched too thin to chase every dispute, and IDC predicts that squeeze is only going to get tighter.
What to do: Build processes that capture, escalate, and resolve disputes systematically. Don’t just spot errors – make sure they’re logged, owned, and closed in a repeatable way. Manual processes will take much longer and have a higher error rate. AI can automate invoice capture and processing, linking invoices to their associated contracts and service usage data, streamline verification, accelerate approvals and anomaly investigations, and more. Tangoe’s AI engine can process invoices in just 8 seconds.
Pull the Needles Out of Your Tech Budget
From mobility to cloud to telecom, subtle drivers of cost creep keep enterprises in reactive mode. The right tools will surface them early, bring them under governance, and redirect wasted spend toward innovation and growth.
Leave no stone unturned. See how Tangoe One delivers real-time visibility and smarter control across your entire IT ecosystem.