Why Enterprise IT Environments Get More Complex as Companies Grow
TechTarget, Tuesday, August 19th, 2025
Enterprise IT complexity grows from years of reasonable decisions that become difficult to untangle.
Enterprise IT environments become increasingly complex not through poor planning but through the accumulation of smart decisions made under real pressure.
Author Michael Shonholz describes three phases: accumulation, as capability is added to meet business demand, drift, as workarounds appear outside official channels, and lock-in, where interdependencies make change risky.
Organizations waste roughly 28% of cloud spending maintaining overlapping capabilities. Successful simplification requires starting with contract audits, building comprehensive environment maps, and aligning the work with business cycles rather than IT timelines.