The BLOG

Sanitization is the bedrock of a strong ITAD strategy and the primary risk-mitigator on hardware that has aged out of regular use. Should you trust Certificates of Destruction to prove that a contract company has safely sanitized your data?

Zynga was at it again. Times had changed, and they needed to change with them. Back in 2009 in an effort to curb excess technology spending, Zynga made the decision to migrate partially out of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and onto a hybrid cloud powered by CloudStack.

Since their foundation, logistics companies have delivered from manufacturers to distributors to customers. They honed the process and streamlined it into a (transportation) science. UPS, for example, became famous for their “no left turns” policy1. But for a long time traditional logistics nursed a growing problem.

Upgrading equipment, decommissioning apps, or migrating to a new data center can be a risky time in any IT lifecycle, and when you’re decommissioning hardware and moving on you need to be prepared. We’ve done a few of these in our time, so we’ve pulled together a couple of questions to help you navigate the choppy waters.

Apto Solutions, a global leader in Information Technology Asset Disposition (ITAD) and Lifecycle Asset Management Solutions, has been positioned as a “Visionary” in Gartner’s December 2013 Global ITAD Magic Quadrant. The recently published ITAD Magic Quadrant has shifted from a North American to a Global focus, due to increasing demand from multi-national companies requiring high-quality, coordinated global solutions.

Sure, we have certifications. But so do a lot of companies. The importance of certifications isn’t in having them, it’s in the change in mindset and process that they represent in your organization. Here are the certifications that we chose and why we put in the work to get them.

It is with great pride and excitement that we announce Apto Solutions’ most recent achievement: The Circulars 2018 Young Global Leaders Award for Circular Economy (SME).

Procurement is a tough gig. You have pressures from all sides. From your suppliers who are trying to creep costs up over time to stakeholders who demand an increasing speed of business to management who wants to cut costs as far as possible. You’re more than a buyer of things, and it’s time to prove it.

Think ITAD is just for old, out-of-date hardware? Think again. The high-frequency trading industry it renowned for it’s cutting edge technology improvements. They helped ditch fiber and move to microwave to increase the bandwidth and reduce latency between New York and Chicago. 

How can your recycling process improve the future of your infrastructure? Iteration and the ability to move quickly. When it comes to agility, we should look to the companies that need to be the most agile: startups. They learn step-by-step and have to move quickly or they will die.

ITAD is a large and complex series of processes. It’s easy to get buried if you don’t have the right skills in place to manage it well. When you dealing with processes that have multi-million dollar consequences, you need to have the right team in place to make sure that everything goes smoothly.

Your enterprise asset lifecycle management is incomplete. Right now, you have a lot of visibility. You see the assets that come in, you see the assets in your data center, and you see the assets that have left. But what happens then?

If you’re like most IT leaders, your life revolves around numbers: response SLAs, Uptime, Performance, Utilization. So when I ask you about reverse logistics, first let me give you an eye-popping number – $200,000,000,000 – Two Hundred Billion Dollars in returns annually. That’s the annual value of product returns as estimated by the Reverse Logistics Association.

How many times have you started a project only to realize that it was actually going to require far more resources and take far longer than you originally estimated? Welcome to scope creep.

Take-back programs have always been a staple in ITAM, but they soon may become a more vital part of an industry in need of financial and environmental efficiencies.