Teqtivity report says remote work is breaking hardware tracking

Teqtivity’s Q2 2026 Asset Intelligence Report says remote and hybrid work are making it harder for companies to track devices across employees, contractors, vendors and borders. The report warns the control gap is creating both inventory losses and security risk, with unrecovered equipment and offboarding failures driving costs.

Why it matters: - Remote and hybrid work have changed device management from a centralized office task into a distributed control problem. - Lost custody records can turn missing hardware into a security issue, not just an inventory issue. - Teqtivity estimates that for a company managing 10,000 devices, a 5% to 15% unreturned rate can mean roughly $1 million to $2.9 million in unrecovered hardware value each year, before breach costs.

What happened: - Teqtivity released "The Distributed Asset Problem," its Q2 2026 Asset Intelligence Report. - The report says companies can no longer reliably account for the devices they own as hardware moves across geographies, vendors, entities and employment types. - The company serves enterprises across 100+ countries. - The full report is available as the full report.

The details: - Among U.S. employees with remote-capable jobs, 52% work hybrid, 26% work fully remote and 22% are on-site full time. - The report says the IT asset management model built around office-based work no longer matches how companies operate. - Device-as-a-Service providers and global logistics partners make it easier to place hardware with distributed teams, but deployment does not equal control. - Three forces are driving the shift: distributed work as a permanent condition, contractor and contingent workforce growth, and cross-border deployment. - Contractors often use the same hardware and systems as full-time staff without the same onboarding, custody and offboarding controls. - Remote offboarding has no natural return checkpoint by default, unlike in-office offboarding. - Fifty-five percent of IT and security professionals say remote offboarding is more difficult than in-office offboarding. - Seventy-one percent of HR professionals report at least one departing employee who never returned company equipment. - The average value of each unreturned device is $1,963. - A 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 uses it, and the record can lag behind the movement. - The report says third-party involvement in breaches doubled to 30% from 15% the year before. - Contractor-issued hardware, often tracked outside IT’s central record, adds to that third-party exposure.

Between the lines: - The report frames asset management as a lifecycle and custody problem, not just a spreadsheet problem. - The biggest weakness is the handoff. Every transfer creates a chance for ownership, location or responsibility to become unclear. - The trend also suggests IT, HR, security and outside vendors now share more of the hardware risk than traditional office-based processes were built to handle. - Teqtivity founder and CEO Hiren Hasmukh said remote and hybrid work are now the operating model, and every device handoff creates another point where the record can fall behind reality. - Teqtivity also points to a customer that consolidated more than 5,000 leased tablets onto a single system of record for custody and location, with automatic status updates through shipping and support tools.

What's next: - Teqtivity said its Q3 2026 report will quantify the cost of broken lifecycle control across unrecovered devices, labor hours, software waste, audit exposure and security risk. - The next report is expected to sharpen the financial case for tighter device custody and tracking.

The bottom line: - As work becomes more distributed, companies are losing the clean handoff points that used to keep hardware records accurate.