We fielded a survey of over two hundred IT and business leaders who operate enterprise applications. Cost, unsurprisingly, is a recurrent theme. Running enterprise applications is expensive, and the cost drivers are hiding in plain sight: integrations, ongoing management, configuration, and testing.
Why Cloud Apps Eat So Much Budget
Across the survey, most IT organizations now dedicate a substantial share of their total IT budget to implementing and managing enterprise applications, and those investments are still rising year over year. Teams are also tying up dozens of full-time employees just to keep core systems like ERP, HCM, and CRM stable, compliant, and updated. When you zoom in on where that money actually goes, four themes dominate: integrations, ongoing management, configuration to reflect change, and testing.
Integrations: The Hidden Tax on Every Change
Integrations are the single largest cost driver in the report, with 61% of organizations naming them as one of their highest-cost areas. That reflects not just building connections between systems like Workday, Salesforce, and ServiceNow, but also handling the complex data mappings, security models, and error handling that sit behind every workflow. As cloud vendors accelerate release cycles, each new feature or update can ripple through those interfaces, so every change multiplies the integration workload.
Ongoing Management: Paying for Integrations Forever
Even after integrations go live, 37% of respondents say ongoing integration management is itself a top cost driver. Teams spend heavily on monitoring, troubleshooting failures, and updating interfaces as business processes, org structures, and partner ecosystems evolve. Because most organizations run a primarily in-house model, with common splits like 80% in-house and 20% systems integrators, these costs translate directly into internal headcount and opportunity cost.
Configuration and Testing: The Cost of Every Release
Configuration is another major drain: 34% cite configuration as a highest cost driver, and 51% say the time and effort to configure new features for each cloud release is their most challenging task. Teams must interpret release notes, decide what to enable, update business rules and security, and then sync documentation and training. On top of that, 34% point to testing as a top cost driver, with pressures to maintain test coverage across modules and integrations while still keeping the business running during frequent updates.
Integration testing is where all of these costs collide: every configuration change and every new release has to be validated across the end-to-end workflow to avoid production issues that can cost from hundreds of thousands up to several million dollars a year. Without strong automation, that means armies of testers and business users running manual regression cycles, stretching release timelines and inflating operating expenses.
How Automation and Opkey Change the Cost Equation
The report makes it clear that IT leaders do not see this cost structure as sustainable, and many plan to reduce their reliance on external consultants while looking for better tooling. An overwhelming majority – 83% – say they are likely to adopt more advanced automation and agentic AI for enterprise app lifecycle management, expecting it to save thousands of hours annually and reduce overall operational costs.
This is where workflow assurance comes in: with a platform like Opkey, integration testing and regression coverage can be automated across end-to-end business processes, not just at the module level. Automated test generation, impact analysis, and continuous validation mean you can prove that core workflows still work after every configuration change and cloud release, without scaling headcount linearly. In practice, that shifts spend away from manual testing, firefighting, and rework, and toward higher-value initiatives like improving employee experience, innovating new capabilities, and shrinking the IT backlog.
