A new article posted on the IT: Connect & Expand blog explains an emerging—and rapidly growing—subset of the technology market: ITAD, or IT Asset Disposition.
ITAD addresses the glut of out-of-service IT assets that require proper disposal, and it’s an important consideration for IT service providers who need to offer their clients complete, end-to-end solutions.
From the article: “Gone are the days when out-of-service IT assets could be stuffed in a closet, hauled to a dumpster or dragged to the nearest landfill to be discarded like so much office trash. Used IT components are now a liability, and their proper disposal has turned into a cottage industry all its own. ITAD, or IT Asset Disposition is booming thanks to concerns about data security, the environment, compliance and risk management, and the ability to recoup technology investment dollars.”
From a services-revenue standpoint the implications are big and growing bigger: “Today, ITAD represents a total addressable market estimated at around $9.8 billion dollars handling 48 million tons of discontinued or excess technology gear, according to recent research by Transparency Market Research. TMR predicts this market will swell to $41 billion by 2019 on 141 million tons of used equipment.
I encourage you to read the article in its entirety. Managed service providers in particular will find the “5 Things to Look For” extremely helpful when developing an ITAD strategy.
As always, thanks for reading.
Thanks for the link to this blog article, Nathan. I think that companies are now getting to the point where they have chosen a destruction vendor (and there are plenty of certified ITAD vendors to choose from), and now put a lot of trust in them to dispose / destroy their assets properly. What I am finding is that companies are not managing assets properly when they are offline and still in their data center. Then they hand a bunch of hard drives or assets over to the vendor and get them destroyed. But they have no one of knowing which drives they handed them and if those drives were managed properly prior to reaching the vendor. The Certificate of Destruction is like the holy grail to companies!