Companies Are Losing Track of the Hardware They Own, Teqtivity Q2 2026 Report Finds
LOS ANGELES, CA, UNITED STATES, August 19, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Teqtivity, an IT asset management platform serving enterprises across 100+ countries, today released "The Distributed Asset Problem," its Q2 2026 Asset Intelligence Report. The report finds that remote and hybrid work have broken the assumptions IT asset management was built on, leaving companies unable to reliably account for the devices they own as those devices move across geographies, vendors, entities, and employment types.
Remote and hybrid work are no longer conditions IT manages through. They are part of the operating model. Among U.S. employees with remote-capable jobs, 52% now work hybrid and 26% work fully remote, and only 22% are on-site full time. The infrastructure ITAM was designed around, a workforce tied to an office, a known network, and a centralized return path, no longer holds.
Every time a device changes hands, ownership can blur, custody can go unverified, and the asset record can stop matching what is actually deployed. Device-as-a-Service providers and global logistics partners have made it easy to put hardware in front of a distributed team, but deployment is not the same as control. The harder task is maintaining an accurate record of who holds each device, where it sits, and which entity is responsible.
Three forces are driving the shift: distributed work as a permanent condition, contractor and contingent workforce growth, and cross-border deployment. Contractors routinely use the same hardware and access the same systems as full-time staff without falling under the same onboarding, custody, and offboarding controls.
Offboarding is where those conditions get tested, because every device eventually passes through that moment. In a centralized office, returning a badge and handing back a laptop created natural checkpoints. Remote offboarding has none by default. Fifty-five percent of IT and security professionals describe remote offboarding as more challenging than its in-office equivalent, and 71% of HR professionals report at least one departing employee who never returned company equipment, at an average value of $1,963 per device.
The consequence is a security problem, not just an inventory one. An unretrieved device is an active endpoint that may still hold company data, credentials, and access to internal systems. For an organization managing 10,000 devices, Teqtivity estimates that a 5% to 15% unreturned rate represents roughly $1 million to $2.9 million in unrecovered hardware value each year, before any breach cost.
The recovery gap now runs through vendors as well as employees. A single device may pass through a Device-as-a-Service provider, a logistics partner, a local configuration vendor, and a retrieval vendor before and after an employee ever touches it, and the record often lags behind the movement. That gap sits inside a wider shift in enterprise risk: third-party involvement in breaches doubled to 30%, up from 15% the year before. Contractor-issued hardware, frequently tracked outside IT's central record, is one part of that expanding third-party 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. Remote and hybrid work are the operating model now, not something IT manages around. Every handoff a device makes is another place ownership can blur and the record can fall behind the reality."
The report includes field evidence from a Teqtivity customer that consolidated 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 organizations across unrecovered devices, labor hours, software waste, audit exposure, and security risk.
The full report is available at www.teqtivity.com.
About Teqtivity
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.
Remote and hybrid work are no longer conditions IT manages through. They are part of the operating model. Among U.S. employees with remote-capable jobs, 52% now work hybrid and 26% work fully remote, and only 22% are on-site full time. The infrastructure ITAM was designed around, a workforce tied to an office, a known network, and a centralized return path, no longer holds.
Every time a device changes hands, ownership can blur, custody can go unverified, and the asset record can stop matching what is actually deployed. Device-as-a-Service providers and global logistics partners have made it easy to put hardware in front of a distributed team, but deployment is not the same as control. The harder task is maintaining an accurate record of who holds each device, where it sits, and which entity is responsible.
Three forces are driving the shift: distributed work as a permanent condition, contractor and contingent workforce growth, and cross-border deployment. Contractors routinely use the same hardware and access the same systems as full-time staff without falling under the same onboarding, custody, and offboarding controls.
Offboarding is where those conditions get tested, because every device eventually passes through that moment. In a centralized office, returning a badge and handing back a laptop created natural checkpoints. Remote offboarding has none by default. Fifty-five percent of IT and security professionals describe remote offboarding as more challenging than its in-office equivalent, and 71% of HR professionals report at least one departing employee who never returned company equipment, at an average value of $1,963 per device.
The consequence is a security problem, not just an inventory one. An unretrieved device is an active endpoint that may still hold company data, credentials, and access to internal systems. For an organization managing 10,000 devices, Teqtivity estimates that a 5% to 15% unreturned rate represents roughly $1 million to $2.9 million in unrecovered hardware value each year, before any breach cost.
The recovery gap now runs through vendors as well as employees. A single device may pass through a Device-as-a-Service provider, a logistics partner, a local configuration vendor, and a retrieval vendor before and after an employee ever touches it, and the record often lags behind the movement. That gap sits inside a wider shift in enterprise risk: third-party involvement in breaches doubled to 30%, up from 15% the year before. Contractor-issued hardware, frequently tracked outside IT's central record, is one part of that expanding third-party 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. Remote and hybrid work are the operating model now, not something IT manages around. Every handoff a device makes is another place ownership can blur and the record can fall behind the reality."
The report includes field evidence from a Teqtivity customer that consolidated 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 organizations across unrecovered devices, labor hours, software waste, audit exposure, and security risk.
The full report is available at www.teqtivity.com.
About Teqtivity
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.
Hiren Hasmukh
Teqtivity, Inc
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