IT Asset Lifecycle Management: Benefits and Best Practices

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Organisations adopt IT asset lifecycle management to protect their data, ensure the optimised utilisation of IT hardware, maximise ROI, and minimise their environmental impact.

31 July 20247 mins

IM stack of IT assets ready for decommission

Specifically, IT asset lifecycle management refers to the systematic and strategic management of an organisation's IT assets from procurement through to disposal. This encompasses all stages of an asset's life, including acquisition, deployment, operation, maintenance, and eventual retirement.

The primary business goals of a lifecycle management strategy are to extend the useful life of assets, enhance their performance, ensure compliance with regulatory standards, facilitate informed decisions, and ultimately, secure the maximum value from each asset.

In this article, we’ll be sharing the benefits and best practices of IT asset lifecycle management. At Iron Mountain, we’re experts in ensuring that your IT assets are managed securely and sustainably from start to finish. If you would like personalised advice on how your organisation can specifically benefit, reach out to one of our team members.

What is IT asset lifecycle management?

First the what, then the why.

IT asset lifecycle management, or IT ALM, covers the processes and systems required for the strategic acquisition, operation, and maintenance of your company’s existing assets — culminating in their retirement and disposal. Why? It protects your data; protects the environment; and protects your bottom line.

Moreover, the core objective of ALM is to maximise the value and utility of assets throughout their operational life, which in turn supports your organisation's overall operational effectiveness and financial performance.

Each company and service provider adopts a slightly different approach to ALM. At Iron Mountain, we tailor our range of ALM services to each client's unique needs, ensuring that every stage of the IT lifecycle management process is managed with precision and in accordance with the highest industry standards.

Today, organisations acknowledge the need for the comprehensive management of their IT assets. We aid organisations in more than 30 countries in their IT ALM processes, sanitising over three million drives and processing more than 16 million assets annually, while generating upwards of $300 million from asset remarketing for our clients. That’s to say that our clients trust us to provide expert asset lifecycle management services and technology that not only adhere to strict security and compliance standards but also deliver value recovery and environmental sustainability.

Without next-generation IT asset lifecycle management, organisations risk exposure to data breaches, asset underutilisation, non-compliance, environmental harm, and operational inefficiencies that can yield financial and reputational damages. Effective IT asset lifecycle management is therefore both forward-thinking and mitigatory; it maximises return on IT investments while ensuring data security and sustainable IT practices.

IT asset lifecycle management best practices

IT asset lifecycle management best practices are oriented toward achieving optimal asset utilisation, security, compliance, and sustainability. To do this, we adhere to the following eight steps and their associated best practices.

Deploy and discover new assets.
Track, maintain, and manage assets in use to maximise business value.
Plan for, locate, analyse assets and customise solutions to redeploy or retire.
Securely and efficiently decommission assets.
Sanitise/destroy all data on decommissioned media.
Recertify and remanufacture to maintain utility and extend life.
Remarket to maximise returns for reinvestment and lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), or reclaim for another cycle.
Recycle materials that can’t be repurposed or resold.

Across the entire lifecycle, there are a range of best practice-related questions organisations need to ask themselves. Among the most important are: how can we establish a secure chain of custody? Are we missing value recovery opportunities? How can we ensure that we decommission our existing assets correctly?

Let’s consider each.

How can we establish a secure chain of custody?

Establishing a secure chain of custody is fundamental to protecting sensitive data and ensuring compliance during hardware asset management and IT asset disposition — here’s an overview of some of the best practices we employ and the business objectives we meet as a result:

Scheduling and pickup: The chain of custody process begins with scheduling a pickup, during which we assign a unique identifier. This unique identifier is scanned into a tracking system, enabling continuous monitoring and traceability from the very start.
Transportation security: Assets are then transported in specially designed, security-enhanced trucks. These vehicles are equipped with real-time GPS tracking to ensure that the location of the assets can be monitored at all times. The trucks are also secured against unauthorised access, preventing tampering or theft during transit.
Arrival and processing at secure facilities: Upon arrival at one of our secure processing facilities, assets are scanned and logged. Further yielding security, our facilities are equipped with multiple security measures, including redundant fire prevention systems, robust power and HVAC systems, security guards, key-card entry, and comprehensive video surveillance.
Data sanitisation and destruction: We ensure that all data on decommissioned devices is either securely erased using ADISA-certified software compliant with NIST 800-88 standards or physically destroyed.
Detailed tracking and reporting: Throughout the entire process, we maintain detailed records of each asset's status and location. This means that our clients can access real-time tracking information to monitor the progress of their assets. After processing, clients receive a comprehensive audit report and a certificate of data destruction, verifying that all procedures were followed correctly.
Are we missing value recovery opportunities?
Your organisation can adopt remarketing practices to maximise the financial return on your retired IT assets, helping to ensure that no value recovery opportunities are missed and that cost savings are increased.

Remarketing practices offer the opportunity to recoup some of the costs associated with IT assets that have reached the end of their useful life. When IT assets are simply discarded or recycled without considering their potential residual value, a substantial amount of money is left on the table. The money being left on the table is increasing as global e-waste is projected to reach 74 million metric tonnes by 2030 — a significant increase from 53.6 million metric tonnes in 2019.

Organisations spend significant amounts on IT assets, with global IT spending expected to exceed $4.4 trillion in 2022. Despite this, only 48% of organisations engage in secure IT asset disposition (ITAD) practices, and a mere 14% recover value from their retired assets. This means that the majority of businesses are missing out on valuable opportunities to lower their total cost of ownership (TCO).

How can we ensure that we decommission our assets correctly?

As your IT assets reach the end of their lifecycle, it’s important that they’re responsibly disposed of. Correctly means ensuring secure data erasure and destruction, maintaining a secure chain of custody, adhering to environmentally responsible disposal practices, and more.

In essence, the goal of decommissioning IT assets is to systematically and securely manage the end-of-life process. This ensures that data is completely erased or destroyed, assets are properly tracked and handled, and all activities meet compliance and environmental standards.

We offer total data destruction via data sanitisation or physical media destruction, a certified decommissioning process, and unmatched value recovery. Specifically, no data is recoverable from the drives we sanitise —100% sector-verified erasure guaranteed. Our decommissioning process meticulously adheres to industry standards in regulatory compliance, environmental stewardship, physical security, and business resilience. . Additionally, as a world leader in value recovery our IT asset remarketing program maximises client-recovered value and consistently provides high returns.

Environmental considerations in IT asset lifecycle management

Environmental considerations are a key part of IT asset lifecycle management’s equation. This is because without keeping environmental implications in mind, organisations risk unnecessarily contributing to e-waste and its associated hazards.

We offer clients our Environmental Benefits Report. This reporting resource provides detailed documentation on the positive environmental impact of their ITAD programs, helping organisations meet their sustainability goals, support ESG reporting requirements, and simplify corporate responsibility reporting. The report includes ESG-relevant metrics such as weight diverted from landfill, avoided greenhouse gas emissions, metals recovered and diverted from landfill, energy saved, and the percentage of products remarketed versus recycled.

Learn more about the Environmental Benefits Report here.