Commentators have noted it as a ‘Once-in-a-Lifetime’ total workplace rethink, the transformative results of which we haven’t seen since the outputs of the industrial revolution. Those outputs took decades to shape and re-shape workplaces, yet through the impact of Covid-19, within two years, today’s enterprise office has been completely re-engineered. Corporate real estate requirements and workplace solutions have been completely redesigned, catalyzed by lock downs and work-from-home orders. In tandem to the changes of the current typical workplace, organizations are thinking about supporting their IT infrastructures to ensure that they remain fit for purpose, and business efficient to uphold modern workplace and workforce needs. Many considerations of making the best use of IT infrastructures include the notion of abandoning static in-house corporate data centers in favor of migration towards elastic cloud-hosted data centers which continue to offer agile usage that facilitates flexible workloads and choice of workplaces.

Currently, flexible working looks set to stay in forms that suit both the employer and employee. According to global management consultants McKinsey* in their post-pandemic study of workplaces in flux, the flexibility to accommodate hybrid working continues as the number one requirement to retain and hire the best talent pools. But the world is transitioning out of Covid-19 at different speeds, and today shows very different working mandates in place across countries and continents. As we write, the APAC financial powerhouse operating out of Hong Kong now faces its largest rise in the spread of the virus with lock downs in force. These spikes or waves have hit continents at different times and severities posing unique infrastructure challenges especially for those organizations which retain global footprints.

Organizations too, vary in their approach. While it is generally accepted across verticals that productivity levels either remained constant or actually rose with remote working, not all organizations intend to continue with permanent flex-working. They fear losing team creativity, especially when collaborating on new projects across functional teams, or when providing the optimal working experience for new employees, some of whom may never have physically met their teammates. With all this flux, how can those who provide secure IT ensure best practices are in place to cope with elastic hybrid working? When assets are classified as redundant in the corporate office of today, how should they be responsibly treated as more flexible alternatives are considered?

Today, it still stands to reason that migrating to shared, cloud or co-lo environments offer a more manageable and flexible footprint to accommodate workplace preferences on the fly, questioning the continued viability of the centralized data centre itself. In practice, most corporate IT leads have opted for a hybrid, part on-prem strategy that gives flexibility but still retains control, compliancy, lower operating costs and enhanced security service levels. This hybrid approach may still require an intensive decommissioning process for unwanted data centre hardware that has occurred from migration or relocation. Additionally, those in transaction-heavy environments where performance is critical, now have the option to relocate assets to the edge - forming mini data centres that bring local computing power closer to end users.

These cumulative pressures have dramatically increased the number of decommissioning, relocation and on-prem

refresh projects across the globe.

Where a full scale decommission is decided, a detailed and involved process needs to occur. Decommissioning is actually one of the hardest processes to achieve without risk as critical data can easily live on in assets that have been classified as redundant. One of the most straightforward ways to decouple risk is by following a pre-defined decommissioning process that gives security for sensitive data stored on devices whilst achieving maximum resale value from IT equipment that is no longer fit for purpose. Detailed planning is essential and needs to include processes first for backup, then systematic decommissioning of software, hardware, ancillary devices, racking and cabling.

Organizations looking to explore and make decisions to establish whether their hardware assets can continue to feature in their IT environment, are best advised to consult specialist IT partners and IT Service providers with expertise in the reusable market

Relocation carries similar processes surrounding data migration, but here the essential factor to understand is the likely lifespan of an asset to judge if relocation is practical.

Upgrading assets with changing IT infrastructures’ needs can take organizations into partial system refreshes. Sometimes this can be delivered by tactically selecting innovative upgrades to bring additional speed or capacity using technologies like solid-state drives or higher throughput I/O cards to boost performance on the fly.

Server relocations could be an option for organizations to react especially in new co-lo environments, with space, power, cooling, and security overheads are all shared and overseen by a multi-tenant colocation provider. Moving servers takes on special considerations, mapping connection ports, rack layouts, and the thorough checking of server health, pre and post move.

Underpinning any of these processes is the requirement to understand fully what’s operating in the estate at any time or location. This is usually best performed through an automated ITAD discovery service that captures, discovers, updates, and details the entire global estate, isolating locations in mind for infrastructure rethinks. Nothing impacts asset migration before shutting down or relocating. ParkView Discovery™ from Park Place Technologies, is one leading asset discovery tool that removes the long winded manual intervention required to compile an ITAD. Starting a decommission or relocation without the output – including a detailed asset list capturing location and serial numbers - is unthinkable. Having this information captured at the beginning can ensure all IT assets and data center equipment are accounted for at the end, which is as equally important for financial and legal record keeping as it is for IT service delivery. Of course, before anything migrates, it’s essential to take comprehensive backups.

If assets need disposal, then attention turns to meeting corporate and environmental targets for responsible disposal, or, where possible, fulfilling the best resale prices possible for redundant equipment. Again, reliance on accurate documentation to prove security, compliance, and responsible ownership transferal for destruction remains critical. Organizations looking to explore and make decisions to establish whether their hardware assets can continue to feature in their IT environment, are best advised to consult specialist IT partners and IT Service providers with expertise in the reusable market. They will have a strong grasp of market values in different regions, understanding of values of constituent parts, together with the necessary logistics to fulfill spares sales.