Is Your COVID-19 Pivot Changing Your ITAD Needs? Important Questions to Ask

If your organization is like most, your business has experienced a major shift these past few months and now the majority (or all) of your employees are working from home. In fact, since COVID-19 landed on U.S. soil, 88% of organizations have either encouraged or required their employees to telecommute. While many of these organizations are experiencing surprising benefits – for example, increased employee productivity – the effects of COVID are ushering in a slew of new IT challenges. These challenges must be addressed head-on to ensure that your company data remains secure.

Ask yourself these important questions:

Do you have surplus assets in your possession?

This can happen for a variety of reasons:

• If you have remote workers and are planning to keep them remote for the foreseeable future, you may not need your office desktops or other peripheral electronic equipment.
• If your company was forced to downsize during COVID-19 you may have surplus assets and unwiped hard drives.
• If you moved your office to a new location, you may have uncovered surplus assets your IT manager didn’t realize you had.
• If you recently combined entities you may have decided to operate with matching systems, leaving you with surplus electronic assets.

In any of these cases, an effective ITAD process may help you reclaim value from these assets. Also, because assets that sit idle pose a security risk, consider working with a trusted ITAD vendor to remove them from service by wiping hard drives or destroying them.

Do your remote workers know the ins and outs of your ITAD procedures?

For many organizations, providing employees with proper technology for remote work in a short window of time was nothing less than chaotic. If you didn’t take the time to formulate and communicate your ITAD procedure to your remote employees, this is the time to do that. What should employees do with their devices if they leave the company? What if, while they’re working remotely, one of their company-owned assets is stolen? Delineating a clear process now takes the guesswork out of next steps should they be warranted. Also, be sure you have a process in place for updating all employees – remote workers included – on any ITAD policy changes you adopt.

If some or all of your remote workforce is reentering the corporate office, were any of them using their personal devices for remote work?

In order to avoid legal trouble, make sure all personal employee devices are sanitized properly once these employees are working back in the office. This is something your ITAD vendor would be happy to help you with. When setting employees up with remote access in the future, keep company data off of personal devices for easier monitoring and tighter data security.

ITAD is a critical component of any business. If the COVID pandemic has created a shift in your ITAD needs, contact us today at 763-432-3117. We would appreciate the opportunity to discuss how we can partner with you to manage your surplus or end-of-life assets.