Often, the only option is setting up a new location such as “ITAD Vendor” and assigning all decommissioned assets to it. This reporting vacuum presents a serious security risk that can threaten the entire decommissioning process.

The visibility required to protect your data must extend more deeply into the afterlife processes so that you can be confident that your information remains pro-tected throughout the decommissioning process. Many companies attempt to bypass this problem by requiring on-site data destruction for every asset in the data center. Although a good choice for some industries, this brings a large increase in the associated service costs and can limit the upside of value recovery in the ITAD process. This also represents a technical half-measure because the on-site activities will still not be accurately captured by ITAM tools. We must fill this reporting gap by extending the reach of our existing tools through the end of the IT asset lifecycle.

• Get Help to Fill the Gap

The future of enterprise asset management lies in the hands of agile IT companies that are disrupting and innovating from within the industry. The black hole problem sits at the junction of IT Asset Management (ITAM), ITAD, and Logistics, and it will require innovation and cooperation across all these areas to solve well.

ITAM companies already manage all of the important assets in your data center, and, if you’ve implemented a CMDB as your single system of record, this continues to be the ideal place to manage your assets as they move on from your data center. ITAM companies need to extend their solutions by integrating with ITAD vendors and logistics companies to track and report on the final stages of the lifecycle. ITAM companies could choose to build out this functionality themselves, but that runs into adoption hurdles that require the ITAD and logistics partners to work within the ITAM company’s system of choice. A better solution would integrate with the ITAD company’s management tools to import data and extend visibility without requiring universal adoption.

Innovative ITAD companies understand that the brunt of solving this reporting gap relies on them. After all, they are the ones that take responsibility for the assets, shouldn’t they own the reporting as well? ITAD companies must adapt by investing in their own reporting tools that can track the afterlife processes by integrating with Logistics and data destruction tools to provide a holistic view. These new software tools should also integrate, if possible, with existing ITAM solutions to avoid the information-silo-problem that CMDBs were originally designed to eliminate.

• Build Transparency and Protect Yourself

Do your asset management tools give you the transparency to securely manage your data during the asset’s afterlife? Or are you just trusting blindly? As a CIO, you are ultimately responsible for any lack of visibility in your organization, and you must protect your data by demanding more visibility into the tail end of the IT asset lifecycle.

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