The rise of hybrid working and the modern workspace means employees use more devices in more places to handle business processes and company data. The growing hardware asset management (HAM) requirements have increased IT workloads significantly.
Managing devices at a granular level is a must to ensure operational efficiency, employee satisfaction, information security, and regulatory compliance. However, getting employees the hardware they need when they need it and keeping tabs on each device can be a costly logistic nightmare.
While most IT asset management (ITAM) conversations focus on software and data, organizations can’t afford to ignore the hardware aspect. In fact, HAM is often more challenging and less scalable, while ineffective device management can lead to costly consequences.
Let’s examine the top HAM challenges in today’s hybrid work environment and how to address the high costs and security risks of poor IT asset management with Integrated Device Services.
Top Hardware Asset Management Challenges
Remote and hybrid working has made HAM significantly more complex, costly, and resource-intensive. Here are the challenges IT teams face throughout the hardware asset lifecycle:
Diverse Device Ecosystem
Besides working from various locations, employees use a broad range of devices running different operating systems — creating a complex, diverse ecosystem. Ensuring compatibility across all devices is even more challenging if you have a BYOD policy, a common trend expected by most employees.
Cybersecurity Concerns
Hybrid work environments increase the risk of security breaches as devices aren’t always in the controlled environment of the office network. Threat actors may also use lost or stolen devices connected to your systems to access or exfiltrate business-critical data. Companies must implement theft prevention and device tracking measures to protect their properties.
Regulatory Compliance
The devices used by your employees to access company and customer data must meet regulatory requirements and security standards. However, managing configuration changes and deviations, ensuring user compliance, and maintaining audit trails is complex, especially in decentralized or distributed IT environments.
Device Provisioning + Configuration
Ensuring employees get the right devices at the right time with the appropriate configuration is extra challenging in a remote work environment — especially when distributing numerous devices to teams in different locations (e.g., during a hardware refresh). Besides shipping, you must consider the high costs of storage and warehousing.
Remote Support + Troubleshooting
As employees rely heavily on their devices to perform their work, timely support is critical for minimizing downtime. Yet, using remote support tools to diagnose and resolve hardware issues has limitations (and sometimes simply impossible). Do you have the ability to deploy ready-to-use replacements at the drop of a hat to keep your team productive?
Device Lifecycle Management
Getting devices to the hands of your employees and ensuring they work as intended is just the beginning. IT teams must track all the devices with access to the company network, perform maintenance and upgrades, monitor their usage, and ensure secure and responsible disposal in a remote work environment where IT teams don’t have access to the physical devices.
Employee Experience
IT teams must optimize hardware performance, ensure devices have the right software installed, and offer training and support to help employees use their devices productively in the remote work environment. A seamless and frustration-free experience is essential for improving employee satisfaction and retention.
How to Overcome Modern HAM Challenges
Modern HAM must address asset tracking, deployment, maintenance, security, compliance, disposal, and more at all stages of the asset lifecycle with the following components:
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Asset tagging: Label equipment with unique identifiers using laser etching to ensure seamless asset tracking and management.
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Configuration + imaging: Configure devices and software based on your requirements and perform testing before deployment.
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Laser etching: Create permanent marketings like serial numbers, barcodes, and QR codes to facilitate asset tracking and lifecycle management.
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Hardware enhancement: Upgrade hardware components like memory, hard drive, and video card to enhance asset performance, functionality, and longevity.
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Storage + warehousing: Provide storage space in a secure warehouse facility to support staged refresh or deployment.
Compugen’s Integrated Device Services cover all these essential elements, offering turnkey solutions shipped to your users directly from our state-of-the-art facilities. It helps you augment capacity, streamline logistics, eliminate additional shipping costs, and deliver a seamless employee experience with pre-configured, ready-to-perform products.
We start each engagement by understanding your business requirements and recommending the best options to support your applications and infrastructure. You can mix and match various services to get what you need without paying for those you don’t. You may also add project planning and coordination to let us handle the details.
The Benefits of Integrated Device Services
Our Integrated Device Services consolidates various services to help you streamline operations, simplify vendor management, and improve efficiency. You can track and record device location and status to support efficient IT asset management, facilitate maintenance, support compliance efforts, and minimize asset loss, theft, or damage.
Meanwhile, the flexible and scalable services allow you to add devices to your fleet on a dime to meet shifting needs — whether you need to configure and deploy a single device or a thousand. We can customize each device to your requirements to improve the user experience and ensure compliance.
Enhance Hardware Asset Management with Integrated Device Services
Our Integrated Device Services help modern IT teams simplify HAM with a comprehensive menu of services to streamline project planning, procurement, deployment, maintenance, and decommissioning. Moreover, the à-la-carte, per-asset pricing model offers the flexibility to meet shifting requirements.
Learn more about our Integrated Device Services and get in touch to see how we can help you increase ROI, enhance security, ensure compliance, and improve the employee experience.
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