Are These 7 IT Lifecycle Mistakes Costing You?

IT teams in mid-market to major enterprises are more than just support units. These teams are doing a million things at once—onboarding new employees, managing access to networks and systems, troubleshooting devices, running procurement cycles, and the list goes on. During all this chaos, one thing that usually gets overlooked is the IT asset lifecycle. 

As crucial as it is, the significance of the IT asset lifecycle gets overlooked when processes are running smoothly. The problem occurs when things start breaking down—when laptops go missing, shadow IT becomes abundant, software renewals sneak up, or assets run way past their useful life. The consequences of such instances can disrupt your IT operations and negatively impact your productivity and efficiency. 

In the current era of tightened budgets, inefficient asset tracking, and rising endpoint sprawl, these IT lifecycle breakdowns are becoming a threat to major enterprises. 

In this blog, we will dive into the common IT lifecycle breakdowns, their consequences, and the steps IT managers can take to rectify these issues. 

Your asset lifecycle is bleeding budget. You just can’t see it.

Most IT managers believe they are managing their assets, but behind the scenes, a chaotic lifecycle may be quietly depleting your resources. You wouldn’t realize until a device breaks down unexpectedly, disrupting business operations, or if a new device hasn’t been procured for a new employee in the organization. 

According to IDC, organizations lose up to $3,500 per unmanaged device every year, often because they don’t realize where the asset lifecycle is breaking down. IT managers may miss the warning signs, like: 

• A laptop that has reached the end of its useful life but is still active
• Lack of strategic procurement has led to the purchase of surplus assets 
• An unused SaaS license renews for another year without review 

Such breakdowns silently contribute to your overhead costs, eating away at your budget and causing time drain in your IT operations. However, the good news is that most of this damage is entirely avoidable if you know where to look and how to manage every stage of your devices’ lifecycle. 

Explore the journey: Understanding the IT asset lifecycle

Every device, license, and application that enters your organization’s IT ecosystem follows a path. From the moment it is acquired to the end of its useful life, the device passes through various stages and checkpoints. This entire asset journey is called the IT asset lifecycle. 

Let’s dig a bit deeper into its different stages: 

1. Asset onboarding

An asset’s journey starts from its procurement, moving on to getting configured and allocated to the assigned end user. All these steps are included under the umbrella of asset onboarding. For example, if a new employee is joining an organization, the IT team will place an order for a new laptop. 

Once received, they will provide the necessary functions and applications on the laptop before handing it over to the employee. When the employee starts using the laptop, it will conclude the end of the first lifecycle stage for that asset. 

2. Asset usage

This is the period during which the asset is in active use and is utilized for regular business operations. The IT team actively checks user devices for vulnerabilities and secures the devices. 

They also periodically update and provide any relevant support for these devices to ensure smooth operations and increased productivity. For example, if a MacBook is assigned to an employee, the IT team will ensure that OS updates and antivirus compliance are up-to-date.

3. Maintenance and servicing

This stage includes everything from scheduled health checks to device repairs and break/fix management. Whenever an IT asset goes off track due to poor performance or complete breakdown, it falls on IT teams to fix such assets in a timely and cost-effective manner. 

They are also required to log any maintenance activities for future reference and to analyze the overall performance of the asset during its lifespan. 

4. Asset offboarding

An IT asset can be offboarded due to various factors, including employee exiting the organization or the equipment refresh policy. Whenever this happens, an IT asset is either reclaimed, reassigned, or deactivated. 

For example, if an employee leaves the company, their laptop can be wiped clean and reassigned to another employee. If the exiting employee was allocated some software applications, the IT team would also be responsible for reclaiming the software and reassigning it to someone else. 

5. Asset disposal

When IT assets reach the end of their useful life, they have to be disposed of following proper protocol. In most cases, asset disposal is treated like an afterthought, where retired assets are piled up in a storage room, collecting dust for ages. 

Good IT asset management calls for asset disposal that is strategic, secure, and responsible where IT managers have to ensure that the retired assets go through the auditing process and are disposed of in an eco-friendly manner. 

Why asset lifecycle management is more crucial than ever

Asset lifecycle management is not a new strategy in ITAM. Yet in today’s world, it is more challenging than ever to execute well. Organizations are not only dealing with a large number of assets, but also a drastic expansion in the type of assets that are now a part of business operations. 

Here’s a snippet of the new reality that IT managers face now: 

• Organizations shifting to hybrid and remote work environments mean that IT assets are not just restricted to the office space. Rapid adoption of cloud software and SaaS applications further complicates the IT ecosystem. IT teams are now tasked with handling these devices and software applications remotely, making asset tracking inconsistent and error-prone. 
• Adoption of a variety of tools used across different departments is causing a rampant software sprawl. This is further compounded by the fact that most of these tools don’t talk to each other so the data remains fragmented and lives in silos, resulting in outdated information. 
• Lack of end-to-end lifecycle visibility is causing IT leaders to adopt more reactive approaches to IT asset management, quietly bleeding away your IT budget. Without strategic procurement, timely renewals, scheduled maintenance, and other lifecycle management processes, you are looking at tens or hundreds of dollars in hidden costs. 

To truly understand the cost of inefficient lifecycle management, we have compiled a list of the most common breakdowns draining your team’s resources. 

We’ll see what they look like in practice, how they slip through the cracks, and how they manifest themselves into an expensive cost center. 

The 7 IT asset lifecycle breakdowns that IT managers deal with

1. Onboarding delays are lifecycle failures in disguise

Imagine this scenario. There’s a new employee excited to join your organization. They’re super-charged, motivated, and ready to dive right into work and make a valuable difference. 

But the laptop required to help them get started at work isn’t readily available on day 1. This may dampen their spirits, negatively impact employee experience, and leave them feeling frustrated. 

Now, here’s how the ripple effects of this scenario will pan out: 

• Both you and the new employee have to wait for your new laptop to arrive. 
• In the meantime, the employee likely fills out HR forms and completes the formal onboarding process. 
• Since their email’s already created, they can sign into work using their personal mobile phone. 
• Not wanting to sit idle until their laptop is delivered, they might also download the relevant applications on their personal laptop to get started anyway. 

The end result of such a scenario is that unintentional shadow IT is born, which can potentially impact the security, management, and effectiveness of your entire ITAM. 

Let’s take a look at the consequences of this failed IT onboarding: 

• Lost productivity: When the most crucial phase of onboarding is delayed, the new employee is left waiting or improvising, which results in a waste of useful company time. 
• Security threats: If the employee resorts to connecting their personal devices and emails to company systems, it exposes the organization to significant security risks. Devices outside of the company control cannot be patched, secured or managed, hence becoming vulnerability points for your network. 
• Poor employee experience: Lack of required tools for employees to do their jobs effectively contributes to poor employee experience which can later lead to employees leaving the organization sooner. 

2. Procurement without visibility is just guesswork

Now, let’s imagine a familiar scenario. Your marketing team, needing a project management solution, independently signs up for Asana and begins onboarding users. 

Meanwhile, your product team adopts a different tool — say, ClickUp — to manage their workflows. At the same time, most other departments are already using Monday.com as their standard collaboration platform.

Without centralized visibility or procurement oversight, each department has made its own purchasing decisions without coordination. The result? Your IT team is left managing multiple project management platforms, each with its own set of users, pricing plans, renewal cycles, and compliance requirements.

What could’ve been a streamlined procurement process becomes a fragmented and inefficient stage in the IT asset lifecycle—one that consumes unnecessary time, budget, and management effort.

Here are some of the real-world examples of siloed procurement and its consequences: 

• Different departments acquire licenses of similar tools without collaborating with other teams or checking existing databases
• Placing a bulk order for new laptops for new hires without checking if there are any existing laptops that can be reassigned
• Spending more money than the allocated IT budget

Lack of strategic and properly planned procurement leads to redundant tools and assets that drain your budget, which you could have spent on growth and modernization initiatives otherwise. 

Another major drawback of decentralized procurement is that you miss the opportunity to consolidate vendors and negotiate better pricing. 

Haphazard procurement also makes your financial planning harder since you don’t have the data to accurately forecast the IT needs for the upcoming fiscal year. According to a Flexera report, 30% of the SaaS spend is wasted due to untracked, overlapping, or underused tools bought outside of the IT’s purview. 

Hence, we can deduce that duplicate or untracked procurement is a symptom of disconnected systems and broken asset lifecycles with a lack of asset usage data and unclear asset ownership. Due to this prevailing issue, organizations keep on buying surplus assets that deplete their IT budget and clutter their technology stack. 

3. Ghost devices, real costs

In an ideal asset lifecycle world, whenever an employee leaves an organization, IT teams follow a detailed checklist to ensure smooth transition and to recover the employee’s assets. 

They are tasked with revoking the access to organization’s systems and networks, recovering all assigned hardware, reallocating or deactivating licenses and updating the IT asset management system with latest records. 

But what happens when IT teams don’t follow these protocols? 

If the offboarding process isn’t streamlined or strictly adopted, assets slip through the cracks and become ghost assets. They still appear in the database but with incorrect information. You still get billed with license renewals, price of unmanaged laptops, and more. 

Here are a few instances that flag an unmanaged asset offboarding: 

• An employee leaves an organization, and their laptop turns into a ghost asset—unsecured and unaccounted for. 
• Your IT team is paying for 100 seats of a specific license while only 78 are actively in use. The rest are either idle or are assigned to employees who have already left the organization. 
• An employee who left last year is still able to access the organization’s network because their credentials were not disabled and their access wasn’t revoked. 

Ghost assets run rogue when there is a lack of a unified asset lifecycle management. If the handoff isn’t smooth, you will end up with: 

• Unused licenses
• Idle assets 
• Increased security risks 
• Failed audits 

Such issues reflect a poor asset offboarding process and lack of a consistent lifecycle management. If you don’t have an integrated ITAM, it becomes highly probable that you won’t be able to follow the offboarding checklist to the T. 

4. Manual lifecycle tracking: The hidden tax on IT

Most organizations rely on Excel spreadsheets and homegrown manual systems to track their IT assets. While these systems serve the needs for the time being, they don’t scale well and eventually, the limitations start becoming prominent. 

For example, a business would maintain one spreadsheet to track its procurement, another one to track its assigned users, a third one to track the assets that are currently in maintenance, and so on. 

Lack of automation in these systems results in lifecycle management that is prone to inconsistencies. The result: a myriad of issues across systems—asset lifecycle breakdowns, soaring costs, and security gaps. 

Let’s see how these manual lifecycle tracking manifests itself in real-life scenarios: 

• Helpdesk agents take forever to resolve a ticket because they have to manually search through a plethora of spreadsheets to find all the relevant information. 
• An audit highlights inconsistencies between the devices’ status and ownership
• There has been no record of transfer of custody or change of location for high-value assets 

The consequences of tracking IT assets go far beyond the manual inconsistencies and data errors. These inefficiencies become an institutional drag, and the repercussions trickle down to the crucial processes and negatively impact the business operations. 

• Time wastage: IT teams spend countless hours manually tracking down IT assets, updating spreadsheets, and reconciling discrepancies. Not to mention the time they spend to find the correct asset information for a relevant ticket or issue. 
• Inefficient budget forecasting: Siloed and incorrect information makes it harder for IT teams to forecast the technological needs for the upcoming fiscal year and they end up procuring surplus devices, licenses, and peripherals. The result? Increased overhead costs. 
• Failed audits: Inconsistent tracking and fragmented data mean there must be missed renewals, compliance gaps, duplicate information, and more, which is a recipe for an audit disaster. 
• Lack of accountability: If no clear responsibilities are assigned to anyone regarding asset disposal, offboarding, maintenance, etc., then everyone assumes it is someone else’s job, and nobody ends up owning the lifecycle stages. 

The ultimate solution to get rid of errors, duplications in data, compliance gaps, and inefficient lifecycle management is the adoption of a robust ITAM. 

5. The silent drain of SaaS sprawl

According to BetterCloud, organizations now use an average of 130 SaaS apps, many of which renew automatically, often without centralized oversight or utilization review.

Now let’s consider a scenario to better understand this problem. 

An organization has procured a costly software license crucial for a particular project. Once the project is completed, the software keeps renewing automatically because there is no tracking system in place that allows the IT teams to review the upcoming renewals. 

Since the IT team doesn’t have the tools to flag this unnecessary renewal, this software keeps adding to your IT budget. The problem in this scenario is that there is no centralized system that provides IT team visibility into the status of all SaaS licenses an organization owns. 

Furthermore, there is no easy way to check the usage data of these licenses, so the IT team can make informed decisions about license renewals. 

Here are the tell-tale examples of SaaS sprawl in an organization: 

• You are billed $7,000 for a design tool that nobody has used in a year. 
• An employee procured a marketing tool but left the organization 4 months later, and the license is still active. 
• There are licenses in your database, but there is a clear lack of ownership for those licenses. 

License wastage is a clear symptom of asset lifecycle mismanagement, particularly of “software” assets. Since there are no clear offboarding workflows in place, software tools remain active in an organization long after their value has expired.  

In mid-market to larger enterprises, where every organization has adopted an abundance of SaaS tools, these unnecessary renewals add up to a significant amount and bleed your IT budget dry. 

Here’s how these SaaS sprawls cripple your organization: 

• Recurring overhead costs: Organizations end up paying for applications that nobody is using, and these renewals can waste thousands of dollars every fiscal year. 
• Security risks: Unmanaged tools that aren’t being synced and tracked regularly can become a vulnerability for your organization. 
• Lost negotiation power: Without visibility into usage and contracts, you lose leverage in renewal discussions and often miss consolidation opportunities.

6. Unreturned devices, uncontrolled risk

In an ideal offboarding, the IT team is notified of an employee leaving the company ahead of the employee’s departure. 

IT managers start with revoking the employee’s access to the company network, disable their work email, check every hardware asset that was assigned to the user and retrieve it, reconcile the licenses, wipe the mobile devices and ensure there are no security leaks slipping through the cracks. 

Unfortunately, this entire process is not carried out smoothly in most organizations. The lack of consistent lifecycle management causes the IT team to miss critical transition points, and the handoffs aren’t as streamlined. The result: dangerous blind spots that can quickly become a security threat. 

Here are a few real-world signs of an inefficient offboarding: 

• A former employee is discovered to still have access to Slack, company email, WordPress, and other such applications. 
• The returned inventory is missing a talking station, a keyboard, or a connector. 
• The device count on the asset database has discrepancies and there are some devices that are unaccounted for. 

According to Kaspersky, 17% of ex-employees still had access to company systems after departure. 

A failed offboarding reflects poor cross-functional handoffs, gaps in device tracking and SaaS license revocation, and a lack of automated triggers to flag failed retrievals, etc. Poor offboardings can lead to: 

• Financial loss: Laptops and peripherals that aren’t recovered need to be replaced with new laptops, causing budget drain. 
• Security risks: Ex-employees having access to company emails can result in major data breaches, leaking confidential information, and company files. 
• Failed compliance: Regulatory frameworks like GDPR, HIPAA, and SOX require strict access controls and documentation. Failure to prove deprovisioning can trigger fines or legal risk.

7. Expired warranties, exploding costs

Picture this: Your sales representative is all set to give a detailed demo to a high-value potential client. Your team has already worked hard to land this client and they just need a final demonstration to close the deal but in the middle of the meeting, your employee’s laptop freezes. 

The IT team scrambles to troubleshoot the device but it takes longer than expected and the call ends early. The result? A poor sales experience and loss of a potential client. 

Later, IT realizes that the laptop used for this call was 5 years old, running way over its recommended 3-year lifespan and warranty, and was never flagged for a replacement. 

Similar instances happen when IT teams don’t have visibility into end-of-life and warranty timelines for the assigned hardware assets. Downtimes become a regular occurrence, the repair costs soar, and IT ends up spending most of its time putting out fires. 

Here are a few more examples of a broken end-of-life system for IT assets: 

• Server failures during a high-traffic period reveal that the server warranty ran out a year ago
• Lack of policies regarding the asset refresh cycle 
• Budget planning becomes more of a reactive project rather than a proactive one
• Repair costs for out-of-warranty laptops soar high

All these problems occur due to a lack of visibility into asset age, warranty status, and reactive refresh cycles. An Intel report reveals that PCs older than four years incur double the repair costs and experience 3 times more downtime than newer models. 

Here’s how these devices become a liability for your business: 

• Higher repair costs: Out-of-warranty devices incur most cost to fix since these devices have run out of their recommended lifespan. Such devices usually require parts replacements, adding up to the repair costs. 
• Lost productivity: Employees working on outdated devices experience slow load times, frequent system crashes, reduced battery life and more—all of which negatively impacts their productivity and employee experience. 
• Support lapses: Most vendors stop offering software updates after introducing newer versions or after their recommended lifespan, opening a gateway to hidden security vulnerabilities. 

The compounding risk of poor lifecycle management

One instance of a breakdown may turn out to be just a minor cost or a small operational hiccup, but regular breakdowns like these compound together and make the situation catastrophic. 

When these breakdowns occur regularly over a period of time, you are left with millions in wasted spend, lost productivity, poor employee experience, and system vulnerabilities. 

Since the asset lifecycle comprises multiple stages, all these stages are connected to one another. Failure of one stage weakens the others and results in a domino effect of failures. Not only that, but inconsistent lifecycle management can quickly escalate and become a business problem. 

Finance teams are unable to make informed decisions during budget allocation, and IT teams cannot procure assets strategically. Security teams can’t protect what isn’t being monitored and hence, the ripples of such seemingly insignificant failures can be felt across the organization. 

What a healthy asset lifecycle looks like

Shifting to a lifecycle-first mindset enables IT teams to adopt a proactive and integrated approach to IT asset management. A robust IT asset lifecycle should have: 

1. Seamless transitions between lifecycle stages: To reduce ambiguity, minimize manual errors, and avoid ghost assets, all assets should be tagged and logged as soon as they are procured. Their status should be updated with every action taken during their active lifecycle, and their provisioning, recovery, and offboarding should be managed systematically. 
2. Cross-functional collaboration: The responsibility on managing these assets shouldn’t lie with IT alone. HR should proactively track assets during onboarding and offboarding while finance teams should actively track asset depreciation, budgeting, and cost-center alignment. Smoother collaboration between these departments reduces the risk of shadow IT, prevents unplanned downtime, and keeps IT costs well within budget. 
3. Automation with ITAM: Adoption of ITAM tools eliminates human errors and gives alerts for crucial action points i.e. for warranty expiration, renewal notifications, device assignments, and provisioning, etc. This encourages lifecycle consistency where steps don’t get missed and the asset lifecycle flows smoothly. 
4. Centralized visibility: There should be a centralized tracking platform that serves as a single source of information for all your IT asset landscape. It should hold asset records, provide reports on hardware and software utilization, give insights for different teams, and enable you to forecast your procurement, run successful audits, and optimize your IT spend. 

Identify lifecycle issues before they impact you

If you’re still handling your IT asset lifecycle using spreadsheets or other manual methods, it’s time to consider investing in IT asset management software. Examine your processes to uncover blind spots and determine how many of the outlined issues are affecting your organization. This reflection will help you seize opportunities to create more efficient workflows, regain control, and optimize your IT budget.

Check Your IT Asset Lifecycle Health Now – Take the free quiz to discover where your lifecycle management is bleeding budget and get tailored recommendations.

IT Asset Lifecycle Health Check Questionnaire by EZO PMM

Take the first step toward a more efficient IT asset lifecycle. Contact us for a demo of our ITAM solution and see how we can help you reduce costs and increase security.