ITAD Services: How They Can Help Your Company

Ready To Get Started With ITAD Services? Here’s 4 Reasons To Choose exIT’s ITAD Service.

Removing, replacing, and reselling your leftover IT equipment is no small venture. Taking a picture and throwing the hardware on eBay isn’t going to cut it. There are numerous things to consider, such as your corporation’s sensitive data, environmental compliance, and the logistical headaches that come with IT hardware. These all require specialized services and a competent strategy.
These vendors specialize in helping you to remove your old or unneeded equipment without being environmentally irresponsible or putting your data at risk. They’ll also help to minimize the logistical costs and asset value recovery along the way.

Thankfully, ITAD services provide the stringent process required for the disposition of leftover IT assets. Aptly named IT Asset Disposition, or ITAD for short. 

ITAD vendors with a full suite of capabilities should be able to provide the following:

ITAD Services:

1. Full data center discovery and teardown capabilities
2. Transport and equipment logistics
3. Data erasure at scale
4. R2 Certified equipment disposal and recycling
5. Remarketing of IT equipment
6. Lease Management and Vendor Negotiation
7. Repair and refurbishment of assets
8. Reporting, auditing, and certification of data destruction/asset disposal 

To elaborate: 

ITAD Services: Data Center Discovery and Teardown

Once your new IT assets arrive, the old ones need to be taken offline and decoupled from the corporate infrastructure. This is an involved activity with a technical, step-by-step process.

Each data-bearing device must be completely uninstalled, stripped of its network access, and meticulously accounted for. Networking expertise, specialized contractors and machinery, and in-depth knowledge of data center environments and discovery software are all crucial ITAD service vendor capabilities for data center teardowns.

ITAD Services: Scalable Data Erasure

No corporation wants to end up in the news for a data leak, so this bit is critical. Every piece of equipment — from phones and tablets to fax machines—must have its data wiped. The location of this could be on-site or remotely, though this decision can be facilitated by input from your ITAD services vendor.

Erasure on-site in racks is more secure, but not feasible with rapidity if the drives being liquidated have already been removed from racks and there is a substantial quantity of drives (thousands).

Regulations, speed, and expenses of each option will need to be considered. 

In specific industries, data erasure is even more critical due to heavy regulations. For example, financial services companies must comply with the NIST standard of data erasure in some instances.

In the healthcare industry, HIPAA laws are more damning than the sword of Damocles in the event of data security breaches. Regardless, a good ITAD company tailors your data erasure requirements to any requisite drive erasure protocols. They also meet any hard drive shredding or degaussing policies your company may have in place.

ITAD Services: Transport and Logistics

As anyone in the industry knows, servers are heavy. Getting them from one data center to another, or transporting them to a disposal site makes moving look like a cakewalk. They’re also easy to damage and need to be disposed of properly.

A capable ITAD vendor should be able to handle a migration of any size within your schedule. They should also be able to provide you with an audit trail and documentation for the disposal of every IT asset you remove.

ITAD Services: Asset Remarketing

While getting capital back from leftover IT assets isn’t a priority for mega-corporations, it certainly helps the rest of us. So if you aren’t a giga-bank that would rather shred everything than get a quarter of the invested capital back, then you may be pleasantly surprised by the returns.

If your assets don’t have significant value, at the very least the ITAD corporation should be able to deduct it from your bottom line expense for their services.

Either way, a newer ITAD company won’t have the breadth of partners to rely on for remarketing IT equipment. As a result, they won’t be capable of recovering the same value for it.

The only easy way to vet companies for this capability is really just to bid out material, which can be time-consuming.

Again, you’ll want comprehensive reporting for assets sold to verify the chain of custody as well as that your returns are appropriate, although many ITAD services vendors will purchase upfront as opposed to on consignment.

ITAD Services: Disposition and Recycling

Once IT assets have been removed, data destroyed, tagged for remarketing, and transported for processing, you are ready to dispose of IT assets without value.

It’s well established that if you are a green corporation, you will do better with consumers; there is value in ITAD services that can responsibly dispose of assets in a safe manner. This is one of the primary purposes of the industry. E-waste isn’t going away any time soon, so look for an E-Stewards or R2 certified vendor to avoid contributing further to the problem; at the end of the day, you’ll have a perk your customers can brag about.

ITAD Services: Reporting and Certification

The aforementioned elements comprise the majority of ITAD services. However, everyone sleeps better at night with accountability, audibility, and comprehensive reporting.

Before you get into bed with an ITAD company, verify. Ask and verify if they’re capable of compliance with all of your organization’s sundry policies and regulations.

Keeping Up With Data Center Growth

Over the next few years, data center technology spending will unsurprisingly continue to grow.

As such, organizations will need to become more agile and able to turn over equipment more capably.

By partnering with a reliable IT asset disposition partner, the process of refreshing IT equipment can be facilitated. By removing the man hours required to handle tedious data center decommissioning and ITAD processes, a company’s in-house IT staff can be spared to help with procurement, operations, inventory, analytics, network security, etc. As a result, their ability to keep up with digital transformation is improved.

Choosing your ITAD Services Vendor

We have peppered in insights for the selection of a vendor throughout this article. However, we also have a more thorough piece on ITAD companies as a whole. You may find it of value if you do decide to enjoy the benefit of employing one for your company.

Ready To Get Started With ITAD Services?

Don’t hesitate to reach out about our ITAD services or contact us with any questions that you may have.