Signpost: Lost tech is hiding in plain sight

In some large organisations, thousands of laptops disappear without going anywhere.

They remain on desks, in cupboards, at employees’ homes or in another branch, while the company asset register positions them somewhere else. In other words, what looks like missing hardware is often a record-keeping fail.

And then unnecessary bills begin piling up: A replacement gets ordered for equipment already in service; software remains licensed to machines that have been retired or reassigned.

“‘Unaccounted for’ doesn’t mean lost or stolen,” says Valene Nagiah, head of asset tracking and management at technology company V-Track. “More often than not, the device exists, but the records are wrong: assigned to the wrong person, sitting in a different location, in storage, or simply never updated.

“Where records haven’t been regularly reconciled against physical assets, we’ve seen initial discrepancies of up to 20% of the total IT estate.”

For a large enterprise, across thousands of devices, that’s a long list of machines with the wrong location or status.

“The biggest issue isn’t a handful of missing laptops,” says Nagiah. “It’s organisations that have lost visibility of large portions of their IT estate over time: thousands of devices across offices, branches, remote workers and business units that couldn’t be reliably reconciled against the asset register until V-Track was implemented. Years of staff movements, device refreshes and poor record-keeping create these gaps.

“Hybrid work hasn’t necessarily increased the number of lost devices, but it has significantly increased the challenge of tracking them. Five years ago, most devices lived in an office; today they move between offices, homes, client sites and shared workspaces, using legacy, manual tracking processes that struggle to keep up.”

To make things worse, hybrid work has put far more movement between one audit and the next, while a spreadsheet degrades with every transfer that goes unrecorded.

“Software is often the bigger hidden cost,” says Nagiah. “When we get visibility into what’s actually deployed, we consistently find licences sitting on retired or reassigned devices, duplicate installations, and subscriptions still being paid for software nobody is using.

“One of the more common wins is simply reclaiming licences tied to devices that were never properly decommissioned. In some cases, this alone has been enough to cover a significant portion of the cost of the asset management programme itself.”

One of the organisations using V-Track to keep tabs on a large and growing IT estate, North-West University, says it assisted in the accurate location reporting and current user logon of IT assets.

“The reporting variance showed ‘ghost assets’, that possibly did not follow the correct approval channels, and how devices move inside the campus.

“This assisted the NWU team to identify these anomalies and address the risk before it became a full-fledged challenge. This improved accountability across the organisation and enabled more informed management decisions regarding IT assets.”

NWU says ongoing reporting and identification of exceptions also improved the accuracy of its asset register.

“Failure to recover devices is usually a process issue rather than a one-off event,” says Nagiah. “The consequences we’ve observed include delayed recoveries, ageing assets, higher replacement costs, and security exposure from devices that are still active but unaccounted for.

“For example, a former employee retained a company device and failed to return it despite repeated attempts. V-Track identified the asset, remotely locked it, and wiped sensitive data before it could be accessed, with records supplied to SAPS for investigation.

“It illustrated that the real risk with an unaccounted-for device isn’t the hardware, but unauthorised access to the data on it.”

Companies have spent heavily on cloud security and identity management, while many asset registers still depend on somebody remembering to update Excel. Those records also feed procurement and insurance, so errors are propagated beyond the IT department.

“Records are usually accurate when equipment is first purchased and deployed,” says Nagiah. “But ongoing verification, whether monthly or quarterly physical audits, is often inconsistent or absent altogether, and many organisations lean too heavily on manual systems that depend entirely on one person keeping them current.”

Each unrecorded office move or period in storage makes the original purchase record less useful.

“Most organisations don’t have an asset problem. They have a visibility problem. The device is usually there somewhere, but nobody can say with confidence who has it, where it is, or whether it’s still being used. Visibility isn’t a nice-to-have anymore. It’s a business, financial and security requirement.”

* Arthur Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx, editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za, and author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI – The African Edge”.

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