The hidden cost of IT sprawl: how fragmented infrastructure drains business performance

Check out the latest blog from ScotlandIS member, Pulsant, written by Technology Director, Steve Spittal.

Most IT estates grow through years of individual decisions instead of a single plan. A cloud account gets opened for one project. A data centre contract stays in place because switching is a migration project the business keeps deferring. Those choices get made workload by workload, and the estate that results rarely holds together as one plan.

A 2026 survey of 500 UK business leaders by O2 Business found that two-thirds see technology decisions becoming harder to make, and almost half think their current setup is more complicated than it needs to be. In the US, Forrester’s Q2 2024 Tech Pulse Survey found 77% of decision-makers describing their estate as moderately to extensively sprawled.

Fragmented estates cost more to run, and the extra spend often traces back to a forgotten cloud instance or a contract renewed on autopilot years ago. The businesses getting ahead of it are working out what they are running, why, and whether it still belongs there.

Here, Steve Spittal, Technology Director at Pulsant, offers his insights.

Fragmentation builds through individual decisions

Sprawl builds through decisions that make sense individually. A department signs up for a new platform to solve an immediate problem. A legacy system stays live long after its replacement goes in. Each is made by a different team at a different point in the business’s growth, often without visibility into what else already existed.

The cumulative effect is an estate with overlapping tools and duplicated spend, and no single view of what the business is running or why. By the time anyone maps the full picture, unpicking it is a project in itself.

The cost shows up in operations before it shows up in architecture

The impact of a fragmented estate is usually felt by people before it is diagnosed as an infrastructure problem. The O2 Business research found that rising operational costs were the most commonly cited consequence, reported by 30% of leaders. Pressure on leadership time and focus followed at 26%, and slower business growth at 19%.

O2 Business chairman Matthew Riley said complexity is what’s holding UK businesses back. That pressure compounds over time: it shows up as time pulled away from running the business and into keeping the estate running.

More moving parts make incidents slower and costlier to resolve

Forrester’s tech sprawl research links growing complexity to reduced operational resilience and increased security risk, alongside higher running costs. When an estate lacks clear ownership, an incident may need to be traced across multiple systems and suppliers before it can be contained.

None of this means a diverse estate is automatically a liability. A hybrid environment that is properly governed, with clear ownership and consistent controls across every location, can be resilient by design. The risk grows when that diversity is unmanaged and there isn’t clear ownership of how the pieces fit together.

Hybrid cloud is often unplanned, and it shows in wasted spend

The Flexera 2026 State of the Cloud survey found that 73% of organisations run hybrid environments, often the byproduct of mergers or siloed application decisions. Wasted cloud spend rose to 29% this year, the first increase in five years. That waste reflects how much fragmentation sits inside the cloud estate itself, on top of the sprawl between cloud and on-premises systems.

Multi-cloud and hybrid architectures bring more negotiating power on pricing and stronger resilience across providers when workloads are placed with intent. Without that intent, the same architecture becomes another layer of accounts and permissions to track, and businesses end up paying for flexibility they never use.

Steve Spittal, Technology Director at Pulsant, says: “We speak to businesses who have added cloud, colocation and connectivity from different suppliers as each need arose, and now manage an estate nobody designed. The real cost sits in the time spent working out where a workload sits, who owns it, and why it’s configured the way it is, well beyond the monthly bill. Getting that clarity back is usually a bigger win than any single cost-saving exercise.”

Matching each workload to the environment it needs

Instead of cutting supplier lists, businesses are responding by rethinking how estates are built, weighing private cloud, in-house infrastructure and colocation alongside public cloud on a workload-by-workload basis.

Elastic workloads may suit cloud, while stable workloads requiring greater control and more predictable cost may be better placed in colocation. Private connectivity ties the two together, so a distributed estate behaves like one coherent platform.

“For businesses reassessing where workloads sit, Pulsant brings colocation, cloud and connectivity together under a single provider instead of three separate ones,” says Spittal. “Its 14 data centres are connected nationwide by Edge Fabric, a private high-bandwidth network which interlinks every site and to public cloud.”

“That model makes it easier to review where workloads sit as requirements change, without managing each environment through separate connectivity.”