Inaccurate IT asset records increase organizations’ costs in South Africa — TimesLIVE
In large South African organizations, thousands of laptops may be considered missing because of record-keeping errors, although they actually remain at workstations, in cabinets, at employees’ homes or at other branches. As TimesLIVE writes, incorrect records on the location and status of equipment lead to unnecessary procurement and software costs.
Valen Nagia, head of tracking and asset management at technology company V-Track, said that a device no one can account for was not necessarily lost or stolen. According to her, equipment is often assigned to the wrong employee, recorded at the wrong location, left in storage without data being updated, or its details are not updated after it is moved.
Discrepancies in records
Nagia said that when accounting data are reconciled with the equipment actually available, initial discrepancies can account for up to 20% of all an organization’s IT assets. In large institutions, this means thousands of devices with incorrectly listed locations or statuses.
In her assessment, the hybrid work format has not necessarily increased the number of lost devices, but it has significantly complicated their tracking. Previously, most equipment was kept in offices, whereas it now moves between offices, employees’ homes, client sites and shared workspaces. Manual accounting systems, including spreadsheets, do not always keep up with such movements.
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Licenses and data protection
Hidden costs may be related not only to purchasing new laptops but also to software licenses. According to Nagia, companies find licenses assigned to decommissioned devices or devices transferred to another user, duplicate installations, and paid subscriptions to programs that no one uses. In some cases, recovering such licenses covered a significant share of the costs of an asset management program.
North-West University, which uses V-Track, reported that the system helped more accurately determine the location of IT assets and the device’s current user. The analysis identified so-called “ghost assets” and anomalies in equipment movements across the campus.
Nagia also cited an example of a former employee who did not return a corporate device despite repeated requests. V-Track detected the asset, remotely locked it and erased confidential data, while the information was passed to South African police for investigation. She stressed that the main risk posed by an unaccounted-for device lies not in the value of the equipment, but in possible unauthorized access to data.
