CIOs can deploy a laptop to anyone, anywhere, in days. Accounting for that same laptop a year later, after it has moved through a contractor, a courier, a retrieval vendor, and two cost centers, is now the hard part. Teqtivity, an IT asset management platform serving enterprises globally, released its Q2 2026 Asset Intelligence Report, "The Distributed Asset Problem," which maps where the asset record breaks and what that break costs.
The report's finding for IT leaders is direct. Deployment is solved. Control is not. Every time a device changes hands, the system of record can fall behind the device, and the gap between the two is where cost, audit exposure, and security risk accumulate.
That gap has a structural cause. IT asset management was built for a workforce tied to an office, a known network, and a return path that ran through the front desk. That workforce is gone. Among U.S. employees with remote-capable jobs, 52% work hybrid and 26% work fully remote, leaving only 22% on-site full time. The checkpoints that used to reconcile the record, the badge return, the desk cleanout, the laptop handed back to IT, went with them.
Offboarding is where the gap shows first, because every device eventually passes through it. Fifty-five percent of IT and security professionals say remote offboarding is harder than its in-office equivalent, and 71% of HR professionals report at least one departing employee who never returned equipment, at an average value of $1,963 per device.
For a CIO managing 10,000 devices, Teqtivity estimates a 5% to 15% unreturned rate represents roughly $1 million to $2.9 million in unrecovered hardware value each year. That figure is only the replacement cost. An unretrieved device is an active endpoint that can still hold company data, credentials, and access to internal systems, which turns an inventory miss into a security liability.
The recovery problem now runs through vendors, not just employees. A single device may pass through a Device-as-a-Service provider, a logistics partner, a configuration vendor, and a retrieval vendor before and after an employee touches it. When a retrieval vendor collects a laptop, but the ITAM system does not reflect it, the device still reads as missing. IT chases the employee. The employee points to the courier. The device is moving through the right process while the record trails behind it. That exposure sits inside a wider shift: third-party involvement in breaches doubled to 30% year over year, and contractor-issued hardware, often tracked outside IT's central record, is part of that surface.
"After Q1, the question we kept hearing was no longer what do we own," said Hiren Hasmukh, Founder and CEO of Teqtivity. "It was how do we keep control when work no longer happens in one place. A CIO can put a device in anyone's hands in a week. The hard part is being able to say, a year later, exactly where it is, who has it, and which entity is responsible. Every handoff is another place that answer can go wrong."
The report includes field evidence from a Teqtivity customer that brought more than 5,000 leased tablets onto a single system of record for custody and location, with status updates flowing automatically through its shipping and support tools. Teqtivity's Q3 2026 report will quantify what broken lifecycle control costs across unrecovered devices, labor hours, software waste, audit exposure, and security risk.
The full report is available at www.teqtivity.com.
Teqtivity provides an IT asset management platform built to support operational control across growing technology environments. By centralizing asset records and structuring lifecycle processes, the platform helps organizations maintain visibility, accountability, and reliable data across distributed teams and complex device estates. Teqtivity offers unlimited asset tracking and full platform capabilities from the start.
