Is Delayed Asset Recovery Costing your Company Money?
Time, of all the things, is not static. Thinking about it, it would look obvious, especially given it’s IT asset managers and data center managers you are talking about. However, it’s an often overlooked fact that the longer you wait in order to do IT asset recovery, the less value your equipment will command. For every organization that is looking to get the maximum return on investment for its IT assets, this remains a very critical factor.
Take an example. Your company just finished an equipment refresh and, consequently, superfluous laptops and desktop computers have been left over. Where do they go, or what do you do with them? There are those who opt for the easy way out, the out-of-site-out-of-mind alternative, dumping the retired excess inventory in a storage space. As much as it may seem harmless, this is an approach that could result to multiple problems which indeed could have a direct effect on a company’s bottom line.
- Assets with three (sometimes four) years old and below still have a remarketing value, but this value will depreciate with every passing day that they are held in storage and more equipment enters the market. Even three years can be an awfully long time especially when manufacturers release newer technology, which leads to old assets saturating the resale market because companies don’t normally upgrade piecemeal, but rather, en masse. The resale market is also influenced by external factors such as cloud service and virtualization trends over time.
- On top of the lost resale value, tossing equipment into long-term storage brings other additional costs. It means storage space that could have been used to store other things is no longer available. It also means wasted time and human resources to move around keeping track of the equipment as they lie idle doing nothing better than soaking up dust and losing value.
- The company stands the chance of a serious data breach waiting to happen when there are hard drives lying in storage, with no records accounting for them. If there are no auditable records to show that every single hard drive not in use has been either destroyed or cleaned by a certified, documented process (by a recovery solutions provider, for example) there is always the risk that your company’s data could walk out of the door, whether by accident or by purpose.
- The fourth issue is not common, but it doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. When assets lie in storage, they get moved or other assets get stacked on them. This rough treatment may result to damage eventually, which is another way of saying the asset recovery value is decreased or lost completely.
That said, what can you do to avoid these problems? It’s simple really. Seek assistance from an experienced recovery solutions provider who can help you valuate current and future assets, including networking and telecom equipment, not just IT.
But the provider does a lot more than just assess the equipment. With their knowledge, they can help you put your assets on the market when the time is ripe to ensure you get maximum ROI, not to mention assist in other aspects like packaging, storage, and tracking your assets properly to avoid damage or misplacement.