I'm an IT expert, and this is the first thing I check when someone asks me for quick cost savings: unused licenses, misallocated user levels, and poorly negotiated renewals.
I’ve been auditing the IT infrastructure of companies in Mexico for years, and there’s one question that almost always serves as a starting point: How many licenses are you paying for that no one is using? It’s not the most sophisticated part of an IT audit, but it’s the one that most quickly yields a concrete figure to present to management—and in most cases, the savings are there before you even touch a single contract with a vendor.
Here's what I look at—and in what order—when someone asks me, "Find me quick savings in IT."
The most common scenario: someone leaves the company, and their Microsoft 365 license (or Google Workspace, or any other suite) remains active—and continues to be billed—for months afterward. In a company with 40–80 employees and normal turnover, this alone typically accounts for 5% to 10% of productivity licensing costs. It’s the quickest review to perform and the easiest to justify: simply cross-check the list of active licenses against the current payroll.
The second common finding: users with Premium or E5 licenses who only use email and Word. Productivity suites have tiers (E1/E3/E5 at Microsoft, Business Starter/Standard/Plus at Google) designed for different user profiles—front-line support, standard users, and roles with security or compliance requirements. Assigning the highest tier “just in case” to everyone is the quietest way to inflate an IT bill.
It’s common to find two or three paid tools—one for video calls, another for project management, and another for electronic signatures—that essentially do the same thing, adopted by different teams at different times without anyone having compared them. None of the individual decisions was a bad one; the problem is that no one reviews the big picture.
On AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, it’s common to find test environments that have been left running, old storage and snapshots that no one deletes, or reserved capacity that far exceeds actual usage. Here, the savings don’t come from negotiating a better price per unit—they come from stopping paying for something that simply isn’t being used.
The worst time to review a contract is the week it’s up for renewal—by then, there’s no real room for negotiation; you’re left with only the choice of signing or losing the service. Starting the review 90 to 120 days before the contract expires—comparing market prices, confirming the number of licenses you actually need, and reviewing the termination terms—completely changes your negotiating position with the provider.
The issues identified during an initial review tend to recur: new employees arrive with misallocated licenses, new tools are adopted without any vetting, and new cloud resources are left unmanaged. That’s why the most useful IT audits aren’t one-time events, but rather periodic reviews—and that’s why we find exactly these kinds of patterns in the 15 typical findings we document in audits of subsidiaries in Mexico.
If you've never done this exercise before, the first review is usually the one that reveals the most savings. This is exactly where good IT management begins: not spending less just for the sake of spending less, but rather stopping paying for what no longer adds value.
30 minutes with one of our directors. No sales pitch—straight to the point.