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When it comes to IT Asset Disposition (ITAD), Gartner finds that IT leaders struggle most with data security and proper environmental recycling. The rapid growth of IoT and connected smart devices especially has forced users and vendors alike to rethink their traditional ITAD processes and security protocols. In response to these challenges, Gartner created the 2018 Market Guide for ITAD as a benchmark for current ITAD strategies and protocols.
Compare your ITAD methodologies to Gartner’s recommendations to ensure that you have the best processes and vendors in place for your specific environments.
The Current ITAD Landscape
The ITAD industry has seen a gradual shift in product and global compliance requirements. Because of the dramatic increase of IoT, mobile, and connected smart devices, there is exponentially more critical data to sanitize and hardware of which to properly dispose. Moreover, on the datacenter side, more companies continue to move towards cloud and often abandon large portions of their enterprise hardware in the process.
This combination of new stressors has put increasing pressure on traditional ITAD processes, forcing companies to find more effective solutions.
The ITAD Services Checklist
The 2018 Gartner Market Guide for ITAD encourages companies to use the following service categories as a checklist to evaluate which ITAD tasks and services apply to their specific environment and hardware needs.
Core Disposition Services
Core disposition services are at the root of all end-to-end ITAD processes, and most ITAD vendors offer some combination (or all) of the following:
- Deinstallation
- Collection and bin rental
- On-site packing
- Transportation logistics
- Theft protection
- Data sanitization and hard-drive destruction
- Resale and recycling
Companies can accomplish some of these tasks in-house, but it is important to note that data sanitization, transportation logistics, and recycling represent the greatest potential risk for your company, so only experienced ITAD vendors should complete these tasks.
Acquisition Services
As a strategy to replace disposed assets, ITAD vendors often offer you deals on equipment from their refurbished stock. These acquisition services include:
- Trade-in Management (for replacement asset lifecycle)
- Service Provisioning (warranty agreements)
- System Imaging (for server, PC, and mobile)
Ancillary Services
In addition to their core disposition and acquisition offerings, full-service ITAD vendors provide ancillary services to add material value to your environments (if you so choose):
- Software harvesting (value recovery)
- Lease return management (compliance to lease agreement to avoid fines)
- Charitable donations – (tax reduction/community engagement)
- Redeployment – (reuse/life extension)
What the 2018 Gartner Market Guide for ITAD Recommends
Before you begin the process of establishing or reworking your ITAD processes, consider the following recommendations from Gartner:
- Although it’s important, don’t just focus on the cost. It’s critical that you find a balance between cost efficiency and risk mitigation to address the risks ITAD-related data security and improper recycling pose to your brand.
- Work with your infrastructure partners to better identify which ITAD processes and characteristics your specific environments call for. From there, you can make smarter decisions on which tasks you can handle securely in-house and which you should contract out to a vendor.
- Do not wait to address the challenges that the IoT brings to ITAD. Start preparing against the industry’s increasingly complex management and disposition challenges before data security risks overwhelm you.
Choosing the Right ITAD Vendor
The 2018 Gartner Market Guide for ITAD concludes with a “representative” sample of global and regional ITAD vendors to better inform your vendor selection. With the featuring of CentricsIT as part of this list, Gartner has highlighted us as a leading industry vendor.
Our clients need look no further than CentricsIT.
CentricsIT ITAD services offer comprehensive solutions to the complications and concerns listed above. We adapt to industry fluctuations and stay far ahead of impending trends and demands. CentricsIT not only saves you money, we deliver complete data sanitization services, offer foolproof international shipping logistics, and pride ourselves on our meticulously-maintained quality certifications.
Gartner explains that, because of our knowledge within secondary markets and our global logistics capabilities, we maximize hardware resale value for our clients. Moreover, Gartner acknowledges that our competitive differentiators in the market are our ability to offer third-party maintenance, field engineering services, and hardware procurement requirements in addition to ITAD services.
Ready to make changes to your ITAD processes based on Gartner’s recommendations? Contact CentricsIT to better manage the lifecycle of your IT devices.
