Where is the sweet spot when replacing your staffs’ devices?

Monthly IT Support Update – September 2017

Hi All,

Following on from last month’s report on BYOD devices and their benefits and drawbacks, this month I’d like to provide some information on some best practices if your business provides devices to staff, as this still represents the vast majority in the SMB area at present.

Arguably, the most important aspect of managing your business IT devices is inventory and asset reporting, knowing who has which device, where they are, and that they are up to date. If you’re on Intuitive IT’s Proactive plan or higher, this is already included.

What I’m really wanting to focus on today is having a formal hardware lifecycle management policy in place. At a high level, this means maximising the return on investment of your hardware. This might sound like a very simple idea: ‘Buy the cheapest devices we can and use them until they break’ but there is a whole range of factors to consider:

• Buy vs. lease equipment
• Vendor warranty vs. third-party repairs
• Additional support costs for sub-standard devices
• Staff productivity levels on old or unsuitable devices, and staff morale if they consider themselves ‘stuck’ on old equipment

There is a certain ‘sweet spot’ for device renewal, where a device may be outside its warranty but still doing the job without requiring any additional level of support, leave it too long though and it’s going to cost more than you save by not replacing it. This length of time is not always the same; different businesses, industries, and even business units will have different requirements for each of their device types.