New IT Asset Intelligence Report reveals a widening gap between IT investment and IT control — and why ghost assets are the hidden cost CFOs haven’t priced in
CERRITOS, CA, UNITED STATES, May 28, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Organizations worldwide are on track to spend $6.15 trillion on technology in 2026. Yet many of those same organizations cannot answer a basic operational question: what devices do we actually have, and where are they right now?
That is the core finding of Teqtivity‘s latest report, “The Ghost Asset Crisis: How Inventory Drift Is Reshaping IT Governance.” The report documents a pattern that Teqtivity has observed across enterprise and mid-market organizations: device records drift from operational reality faster than IT teams can reconcile them, and the financial and security consequences compound quietly until they surface as a budget shock or a breach.
Record IT budgets have not produced better hardware control. They have produced more hardware, distributed across more locations, managed by the same stretched IT teams.
The report identifies several forces driving the drift. Remote and hybrid work has pushed devices into homes, co-working spaces, and across different countries, making physical custody harder to verify. Employee offboarding remains a persistent failure point: Industry data cited in the report finds that 71% of companies report at least one departing employee did not return company equipment, and 59% of that unreturned hardware contained sensitive information. Meanwhile, the average IT team is supporting 108 employees per person – a ratio that makes manual reconciliation unrealistic at scale.
The financial exposure is not theoretical. According to industry data, the average breach lifecycle at 233 days. Healthcare organizations face an average breach cost of $7.42 million. Teqtivity’s own customer modeling points to between $2 million and $5 million in capital leakage for enterprises carrying significant untracked hardware.
“Every year, the spend number goes up and the visibility problem gets worse,” said Hiren Hasmukh, Founder and CEO of Teqtivity. “CFOs are approving nine-figure technology budgets while IT teams are still manually trying to figure out which laptops came back from employees who left six months ago. Ghost assets are not a data hygiene problem. They are a governance failure, and they are sitting inside every organization’s balance sheet right now.”
The report also examines AI readiness as a function of hardware visibility. Organizations accelerating AI adoption are discovering that deploying AI tools to an untracked device fleet creates a second-order problem: AI requires knowing not just what software sits on a device, but whether that device exists, who has it, and whether it meets hardware requirements for the workloads being pushed to it. Without accurate asset data, AI initiatives stall at deployment.
“We built Teqtivity because this problem kept showing up in organizations that had already bought every other tool,” Hasmukh added. “They had MDM. They had endpoint security. They had service desk software. What they did not have was a clear, current picture of what hardware existed and who was accountable for it. Everything else depends on that.”
The Q1 2026 IT Asset Intelligence Report is the first in Teqtivity’s 2026 quarterly series. Each edition addresses a distinct dimension of the hardware visibility gap, drawing on third-party research and Teqtivity’s direct observations across its customer base, which spans enterprises that operate globally. The full report is available at teqtivity.com.
Hiren Hasmukh
Teqtivity, Inc
hello@teqtivity.com
Visit us on social media:
LinkedIn
Facebook
X
Legal Disclaimer:
EIN Presswire provides this news content “as is” without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability
for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this
article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the author above.
Media gallery
