The Stage Everyone Forgets
THE CRUNCH · EP 27
TAP TO PAUSE
PAUSED — TAP TO RESUME
Every IT asset moves through a lifecycle — plan, procure, deploy, operate, refresh. Most programs run all of it well, then forget the last stage: disposition. When a retired device is never formally dispositioned, the asset record never closes.
The device becomes a ghost asset — still on the books, still depreciating, and, if it holds data, an unaccounted endpoint nobody is securing. Industry estimates put ghost assets at 10–30% of fixed assets, and the costliest ones are the laptops and drives that simply went quiet.
The fix is to treat disposition as a managed lifecycle stage: recover the device under chain of custody, sanitize or destroy the media to NIST 800-88 through a certified operation, and feed the serialized certificate back into the asset record — so it finally reads "retired, destroyed, certificate on file." That closes the loop, kills the ghost asset, and produces the evidence an auditor will ask for.
Certified destruction with serialized reporting back to your asset record is standard on every CyberCrunch engagement.