As technology innovations have grown rapidly and as digital transformation initiatives have forced companies to continually refresh their business models, IT asset recovery management has become critical. Especially taking into account that the evolution of the business model has shortened the lifecycle of IT assets. Therefore, it is essential for organizations to extract as much value as they can from their IT assets to counter the effects of the shorter lifecycle.
In today’s climate of high alert for cyber criminals and costly breaches, extracting value has to be approached with greater caution. According to the Ponemon Institute and Accenture’s 2019 Cost of Cybercrime Study, malware and malicious insider-related cyber attacks jumped 12% in 2018, accounting for one-third of all cyber attack costs. The cost of malware to companies increased 11%, to more than US$2.6 million on average for each company. Malicious insiders—employees, temporary staff, contractors and business partners—jumped 15%, costing each company on average US$1.6 million (Ponemon Institute and Accenture, 2019).
Considering the massive upheavals in the business world and the growing threats posed by cyber criminals, it is a complex process to extract value from IT assets while ensuring data security. environmental stewardship, and compliance with industry regulations.
To add to the complexity of the process, there is a need to offset increasing concerns about the growing number of aging and obsolete IT assets, the environmental impact of electronic waste, and the explosive growth of the Internet of Things (IoT). As well, trends such as virtualization, migration to the cloud, and the consolidation of data centers are adding to the growing number of obsolete IT equipment.