What Is The IT Friction Tax: How Atera Helped Cut Unnecessary Work

Every IT team carries a hidden cost that rarely shows up on a dashboard: the friction tax. It’s the daily accumulation of small, unreported problems.

It could be a laptop that hasn’t been restarted in two weeks, a patch that never got pushed, or a device nobody can quite account for, that quietly drains productivity long before anyone files a ticket about it.

SWNS Media Group, a global news content company with a four-person IT team supporting over 200 staff, was paying that tax until it adopted Atera service management tools. The results were dramatic: open tickets dropped from 130 to around 15, and the team needed only half the headcount to manage them.

That turnaround offers a concrete look at what it actually takes to close the friction tax gap, and new research suggests SWNS’s experience is far from unique.

Before looking at how SWNS closed that gap, it’s worth defining exactly what the friction tax is and why it’s so easy for IT teams to miss.

What Is the Friction Tax in IT?

The friction tax is the accumulated cost of small, unresolved IT problems that go unreported until they force a bigger disruption. It shows up as delayed patches, unmonitored devices, and repetitive manual work that IT teams absorb quietly, rather than as a single dramatic outage.

Unlike a system-wide failure, the friction tax rarely triggers an obvious alarm. It builds in the gaps: an employee who doesn’t bother filing a ticket because the fix seems more trouble than the problem, a laptop that keeps running unpatched because nobody notices until it fails outright, a spreadsheet-based process that nobody has time to formalize. Left unaddressed, this friction compounds. But once visible, it becomes something IT teams can actually manage.

With those terms defined, the SWNS Media Group case study is a concrete illustration of how this plays out inside a real IT team, and what it actually takes to fix.

How Did SWNS Media Group Eliminate Its Friction Tax With Atera?

When John Merrick joined SWNS Media Group as Technical Lead in December 2021, the friction tax was already visible everywhere he looked, he just didn’t have a name for it yet. There was no clear patch management process. The four-person IT team was managing 130 open tickets for a workforce spread across nine global offices. And basic visibility, knowing which device belonged to which employee, was effectively nonexistent.

John Merrick, Technical Lead at SWNS Media Group, explained:

“If Finance came to us and said, who’s using these devices? It would be like, I don’t know.”

That single admission captures the visibility gap at the heart of the friction tax. IT teams cannot fix what they cannot see, and without a system tracking devices, patches, and ticket history in one place, small issues pile up invisibly. Merrick recalled the team’s most common discovery when investigating a slow or malfunctioning laptop: “The first thing we usually see is this laptop hasn’t been restarted for two weeks.” Left unpatched, some machines had accumulated 20 or 30 outstanding updates before anyone noticed.

After bringing Atera into SWNS, that invisible backlog became manageable. Custom fields gave the team visibility into device purchase orders and ownership, closing the exact gap that once left them unable to answer Finance’s questions. Atera’s remote access let engineers monitor and patch laptops proactively, wherever in the world they were located, instead of waiting for a failure to be reported.

Merrick also pointed to Atera’s AI-powered script generator as a direct fix for another source of hidden friction, the manual, repetitive work of finding or writing fixes for one-off issues:

“Instead of referring to a search engine and wasting time finding the right script to run, we just describe the problem and receive a script in seconds to review and run on devices remotely. It has dramatically improved resolution time.”

Software bundles removed another layer of friction entirely. Rather than manually installing common applications on every new laptop, interrupting the employee in the process, the team now pushes a pre-configured bundle in seconds, with no disruption to the end user. Automated ticket routing, tied to dedicated alias addresses, eliminated the need to manually categorize the 20 to 30 domain-related alerts SWNS receives on a typical day.

The combined result: SWNS went from 130 open tickets to around 15, and the team needed just two people to manage that workload instead of four. Merrick’s team now meets only twice a week to review outstanding items, a stark contrast to the daily ticket grind that defined the pre-Atera environment.

SWNS’s story shows what closing the gap looks like inside one team. The next question is whether this pattern shows up more broadly, and new research suggests it does, at scale.

How Widespread Is the Friction Tax Across Enterprises?

Atera’s “Friction Tax” report, based on parallel surveys of 500 senior leaders and 1,000 employees at large U.S. enterprises conducted by Atomik Research, found that friction of this kind is a daily, near-universal experience rather than an occasional inconvenience.

According to the research, 88% of employees lose time every day to stalled or broken systems, and 61% say they have delayed or avoided completing an important task because the process to do so was too broken to bother with. That second figure is the friction tax in its purest form: work that simply doesn’t happen, with no ticket, no complaint, and no visibility for the IT team trying to manage it.

The visibility gap SWNS experienced firsthand also shows up clearly in the data. The report found that 37% of employees don’t file a ticket when something breaks, and 50% simply find a workaround instead of reporting the problem at all. On the leadership side, 74% of leaders admit their IT team likely sees 75% or less of the problems actually occurring across the organization. Put plainly: for every issue that reaches a service desk, there may be several more that never do.

This isn’t the only enterprise IT team to see measurable gains from closing that gap with Atera. Football club Leeds United, whose IT department supports over 350 full-time staff, and more than 1,000 on match days, reported a 25-35% reduction in ticket volume after adopting Atera’s AI Copilot for self-service resolution, according to the club’s IT team.

While it was a different environment, same underlying pattern emerges. When employees can resolve issues themselves instead of either filing a ticket or quietly working around the problem, the friction tax starts to come down.

The numbers above put that scale in context.

What Does Closing the Friction Tax Actually Require?

SWNS’s experience and Atera’s own research point to the same conclusion from two different directions. The friction tax isn’t primarily a technology problem, it’s a visibility problem, compounded by workflows that were never built to surface small issues before they become larger ones.

Fixing it requires giving IT teams a clear, comprehensive view of their environment, giving employees an easy way to resolve issues without quietly working around them, and treating AI as an addition to a properly structured process rather than a substitute for one.

For the broader market, the report suggests most organizations are still carrying a significant, largely invisible cost that a more visible, better-structured approach to IT service management could meaningfully reduce.