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12/06/2026 8:55 pm
TL;DR: Poor IT asset management creates measurable waste through unused devices, redundant purchases, manual tracking errors, and reactive maintenance, according to JumpCloud, with security and compliance risk rising when hardware is not tied to user identity. The control issue is not inventory alone but governance: asset visibility, lifecycle tracking, and offboarding discipline now determine cost, risk, and auditability.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by JumpCloud: Hidden costs of poor IT asset management and how to eliminate them
By the numbers:
- Buying just 5 extra laptops a quarter at $1,200 each adds up to $24,000 per year in unnecessary spending.
- 77% of ITAM pros believe it’s a must for finding and managing all of an organization’s software, hardware, and firmware.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams tie asset management to identity governance?
A: Security teams should link each device to a named user or account, then carry that relationship through onboarding, reassignment, and offboarding.
Q: Why do unmanaged devices create both security and budget risk?
A: Unmanaged devices can be lost, overbought, or reused without proper wipe or reassignment, which creates waste and exposure at the same time.
Q: What breaks when lifecycle tracking is handled in spreadsheets?
A: Spreadsheets make device state easy to miss, slow to update, and hard to trust across teams.
Practitioner guidance
- Bind every device to a user identity Create a single inventory record for each asset that includes owner, assigned user, location, and current lifecycle state so IT can trace responsibility without manual reconciliation.
- Make offboarding close the hardware loop Require device return, remote wipe, and record closure to complete before a leaver is fully deprovisioned, especially for remote workers and contractors.
- Use lifecycle data to drive refresh decisions Replace calendar-based refresh assumptions with purchase date, warranty status, usage trends, and repair history so replacement happens when evidence supports it.
What's in the full article
JumpCloud's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- A breakdown of the seven cost centres behind poor IT asset management, including overbuying, reactive repairs, and wasted labour.
- Practical examples of how to centralise inventory and map device ownership into onboarding and offboarding workflows.
- Stepwise guidance on lifecycle tracking, from procurement to retirement, for teams that need implementation detail.
- JumpCloud's own asset-management workflow examples for teams that want a vendor-specific operational view.
👉 Read JumpCloud's analysis of hidden IT asset management costs and identity linkage →
IT asset management and identity linkage: where teams lose control?
Explore further
12/06/2026 10:39 pm
Asset governance collapses when device records are separated from identity records. Poor ITAM is not just a visibility problem. It breaks the assumption that a device can be managed independently of the person or account using it. Once that assumption fails, offboarding, auditability, and accountability all degrade at the same time. The implication is that hardware inventory must be treated as part of identity governance, not as a separate operations spreadsheet.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 67% of organisations still rely heavily on static credentials despite the risks they pose to agentic AI deployments, according to The 2026 Infrastructure Identity Survey.
- Only 13% of organisations feel extremely prepared for the reality of agentic AI, even as 53% expect AI to run major portions of their infrastructure autonomously within three years.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How do organisations know their asset management controls are working?
A: They should see fewer ghost assets, lower duplicate procurement, faster device recovery, and cleaner offboarding records. A reliable program can show which assets are active, who owns them, and when they were last updated. If those signals are missing, the control exists in name only and the organisation is still guessing.
👉 Read our full editorial: Identity-linked IT asset management is now a control problem
