The clock is ticking. When you think about it, it seems obvious, but it’s a fact that’s often overlooked by busy IT asset managers and data center managers: The longer you wait to resell a retired IT asset, the less valuable it will be. This should be an important consideration for organizations that are trying to get the maximum return on investment (ROI) for their IT assets.

Consider this scenario: Your company just completed an equipment refresh and, as a result, it now has a number of extraneous desktop and laptop computers left over. What do you do with them? Some companies choose the out-of-site-out-of-mind approach, stuffing the retired equipment in a closet or storage space. This approach can cause a number of problems that directly affect a company’s bottom line:

• Assets up to three or four years old often have remarket value (meaning they can be resold), however, their value will decline over time as more assets come onto the market. That three- to four-year window gets even shorter when newer technology is released by the manufacturers, flooding the resale market with old technology (companies tend to upgrade en masse). Other trends, such as virtualization and cloud services, also impact the resale market over time.
• Storing equipment long-term has costs in addition to the lost resale value. It uses up storage space that could be used for other things, as well as the time and human resources to move around and keep track of the assets as they sit around doing nothing but lose value and gather dust.
• Hard drives sitting in storage, with no records accounting for them, are a serious data breach waiting to happen. If you do not have auditable records that all the hard drives in your equipment have been wiped by a certified, documented process, or that they have been destroyed, there is a risk data could accidently (or purposely) leave the control of your organization.
• It’s less common but it happens: As equipment sits around in storage, it gets moved around, stacked; other equipment is stacked on it. All of this rough treatment can eventually result in damage, which will decrease or completely eliminate the value of used IT assets.

So what can you do to avoid these problems? Get assistance. A knowledgeable remarketing partner can help you assess the current and future value of all of your equipment—not just IT equipment, but telecom and networking equipment, as well. Your partner should be able to help you move your equipment onto the market at just the right time for maximum ROI and they should be able to help you package, store, and track your equipment properly so that it isn’t damaged or misplaced.

While some vendors specialize in only certain types of equipment, we recommend finding a vendor that can process all of your company’s equipment. Working with a partner that can help you plan and implement an enterprise-wide IT asset disposition program will save your company much more time and money in the long run.