Device-as-a-Service: Taking Care of Device Management from Start to Finish

In the growing debate between corporate ownership and Device-as-a-Service (DaaS), companies continue to search for a device management solution that solves these issues:

• Overhead, procurement, distribution, and deployment
• Local transport and international shipments
• Installation and user setup
• Customization and accountability of network and security protocols
• Device maintenance
• Proper hardware disposition and data security
• Clearly outlined device retirement system

There are pros and cons to both methodologies, depending on the specific needs of your business model. And although DaaS successfully addresses each of the operational concerns listed above, some companies remain skeptical of its security competency. With multi-location or remote employee scenarios especially, isn’t it more secure to keep device procurement, distribution, and disposition initiatives contained in-house?

The short answer is no.

Secure Imaging and Setup

With the right DaaS provider, each employee device comes pre-installed with your company’s specific:

• Gold image
• Security software
• Automated update schedules
• SCCM mobile device management tools^[1]

Once your company receives the devices at each location, a certified L2 engineer will come onsite to facilitate the setup and configuration of domain, network, and application access.

Work with the Experts

Chances are, your HR and IT teams have other things to concern themselves with than becoming industry experts in secure shipments and distribution, asset management tagging, and IT asset disposition.

Procurement and Configuration

DaaS vendors also provide comprehensive asset tagging in addition to procuring, imaging, and prepping for distribution. Each device will receive a RFID tag and will be registered in an Asset Management Tool before being assigned to the corresponding user (tagging and the management tool can used in congruence with the SCCM agent for remote management purposes). These tagging and management tools help you keep detailed accounts of in-use, pending, in-repair, and EOL devices.

Customized Shipping and Distribution

Of course, it’s important to pay attention to compliance and security for device shipments and distribution initiatives, but keeping up with the minutiae can also distract you from important work supporting the needs of the business. And, most likely, you don’t have the in-house resources or expertise to navigate the extensive red tape of shipping hardware internationally. If you want to avoid the inconveniences of delays or penalties at the border, allow the DaaS shipping specialists and drivers^[2] to step in and focus on what they do best. Secure chain of custody (with legal documentation and time-stamped photo evidence) is guaranteed from procurement, to employee distribution, back to upgrade and trade-in purposes.

Data Sanitization and ITAD

If you were managing corporately-owned devices in-house, you would have to work out the logistics of R2-level IT disposition and recycling your EOL devices. Most importantly, before you recycled or disposed of them, you would have to perform the complete sanitization of latent data from the hard drives. Again, you might not have the bandwidth to pull this off in-house, and you don’t need to be using the “mom and pop” data-wipe shop down the road, or one-size-fits-all software to perform such critical procedures (because they can’t ensure compliance or provide breach insurance).

DaaS vendors, however, provide on-and-off premise, NIST-800 level data sanitization services for upgrades and employee turnover. When an employee needs to upgrade their device, L2 engineers will facilitate a local-to-local migration of necessary data to the new golden-imaged device before completing compliance-necessitated data sanitization processes (either shredding or Blancco certified wiping). On top of using highly-vetted technicians, the Blancco software is purely “write-only;” it does not have a read functionality, meaning that, even while it is being sanitized, your data is completely inaccessible during the process.

We Take Care of Everything from Start to Finish

Corporately-owned device management is a great idea in theory, but in practice, it is cumbersome, taxing on your IT team, and significantly less secure.

Alternatively, the CentricsIT Advanced Exchange Replacement (AER) program is a DaaS offering that provides all of the above services and more, thus ensuring that you can have a plug-and-play device on hand within a matter of hours, without the hassle of the OEM warranty desk, no matter the location of the device or your employee.

We provide the mechanism by which you architect accountability and standardization into your business-wide device management.

Need a better, more secure device procurement and management system? Contact CentricsIT to begin standardizing your device security across your entire enterprise.