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| Redemtech Helps International Financial Services Company Go Green While Saving Money, Improving Security |
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- Cut asset disposition costs by 58% annually by implementing just-in-time inventory and increasing technology utilization.
- Saved $3.3 million redeploying desktop and laptop computers.
- Saved $2.3 million procuring used equipment for temporary expansion.
- Among the first financial services organizations to fully encrypt and use Brinks-level security for off-network data-bearing assets.
- Used Datasure Lock-IT to secure defective hard drives during transport, reducing risk and cost.
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During the past several years, a Fortune 50 financial services company has been way ahead of the game when it comes to developing centralized IT asset management processes to make it easier to track and redeploy equipment used throughout its nearly 6,000 locations throughout the world. By adopting this effort, the company saved $5.8 million, improved data security, ensured regulatory compliance and protected the environment.
Situation
Recognizing that fragmented asset management is inherently risky and inefficient, the company embarked on a program to centralize change management processes. The company wanted to move away from conventional "refresh" practices to a leaner, more fluid approach that extends the useful life of technology to prevent excess inventories from building up, draining value and creating security risks. The firm also wanted to ensure that assets could be quickly, efficiently and securely redeployed where and when they were needed.
Implementing these standards required new processes for IT asset utilization, security and recycling across the enterprise. The company developed a best practices approach that ensured processes exceeded the highest standards required by state, federal or international regulations. This approach eliminated the burden of reacting to every new regulation or change to an existing law. These standards address every stage of the asset lifecycle and are applied, and monitored, company-wide.
Challenge
More than most industry sectors, the financial services industry must respond to fluctuating demand and other market conditions quickly, especially in today’s volatile economy. This becomes even more challenging when you have highly decentralized operations like this company, with nearly 6,000 stores internationally.
Like many financial institutions, this company is subject to a sea of regulations on a state-by-state, federal and international level, for consumer privacy, fair credit reporting, environmental disposal and financial disclosure. The company must put people and technology close to the consumers and businesses it serves, increasing the complexity of asset management and making it more difficult to enforce enterprise standards.
These challenges often become even more complicated by mergers and acquisitions. For this company, a large-scale merger proved to be the catalyst for developing a strategy to centralize IT asset management and standardize regulatory compliance.
Solution
To accomplish this, the company consolidated asset disposition across its enterprise with select outsourcing partners. Working with Redemtech as a top partner, the company established reliability metrics for performance measurement and reporting of critical change management functions. Metrics were extended to logistics operations to provide transparency to asset inventory in transit, at receipt and during inventory redeployment. Business rules for logistics, security, configuration, service agreement, quality and reporting were developed and executed systematically.
Security has emerged as a driving issue in asset management. This company was one of the first to implement full encryption of data-bearing assets prior to transit, mitigating data security risks when assets are most vulnerable. During the transition to full encryption, the company implemented a policy that “no unencrypted media can be transported via commercial carrier.”
The company was able to maintain a high level of security when it had to swap out thousands of defective disk drives from branch offices around the country. Since there was no certainty that drive encryption would be effective given the faulty nature of the hard drives, the company used Redemtech’s Datasure Lock-IT to secure data in transit. Potentially sensitive data was temporarily secured until certifiably destroyed at a Redemtech processing facility, protecting the company from privacy breaches and saving significant money compared with other options.
Data-bearing assets that have not been encrypted were transported using Brinks-level security, which is facilitated through Redemtech to ensure consistency and consolidated reporting. The company is also pilot testing and will be the first to implement a new high-security logistics program through Redemtech.
All assets have a serial number that is recorded at the point of recovery and reconciled at point of receipt to document that no assets were lost in transport. The totes used to transport assets and the security seals on these totes can be serialized to ensure equipment has not been tampered with during transport. Data destruction is verified through a series of documented procedures and indexed back to parent asset records. Further, forensic data audits are randomly conducted on assets in the data overwriting process to ensure quality control.
Results
This diversified financial services institution saved $5.8 million dollars over a one-year period by improving IT asset utilization and finding lower cost procurement alternatives. The company also simplified regulatory compliance through uniform, industry-leading data security and environmental practices that eliminate the need to react to regulatory changes.
Increasing asset utilization has significantly reduced the volume of aging IT equipment entering the waste stream. The company documented a 58 percent reduction in asset disposition costs in a single year as a direct result of reducing the volume of equipment being decommissioned. Equipment that has reached end-of-life and has minimal market value is recycled according to the company’s zero-export, zero-landfill, zero-incineration policy that exceeds all regulatory requirements.
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