Smarter Device Refresh: Balancing Costs and Employee Productivity

Deciding when and how to refresh employee devices is a complex balancing act for IT departments. The process involves navigating tight budgets, addressing diverse employee needs, and overcoming technical hurdles—all while ensuring minimal disruption to productivity. Many companies refresh devices solely based on age, replacing a fixed portion every few years. However, this approach often leads to unnecessary spending or employees struggling with outdated hardware that impacts performance.

Challenges IT teams face in device refresh planning

IT Operations teams must weigh multiple factors when determining the right time for a device refresh. Relying solely on age-based refresh cycles can lead to inefficiencies and unnecessary costs. Key considerations include:

• Budget Constraints and Misaligned Priorities: Justifying the cost of new devices when existing ones still function, albeit underperforming, is a persistent challenge. Balancing financial limitations with the necessity to maintain efficiency often leads to reactive decision-making, rather than proactive planning.
• Diverse Hardware Needs and Usage Patterns: Roles within an organization require varying levels of computing power, making it difficult to standardize refresh cycles. Over-provisioning leads to wasted resources while under-provisioning hinders productivity.
• Unpredictable Lifespans and Logistical Issues: Hardware ages inconsistently, and unexpected failures can disrupt refresh plans and inflate costs. Accurate tracking of devices, their specifications, and warranty statuses is another challenge, often compounded by logistical hurdles in remote or hybrid work setups.
• Employee Perception vs. Technical Assessments: Employees’ experiences with their devices don’t always align with IT’s technical evaluations. Some employees may feel their devices are slow, while IT data suggests otherwise. Others may work on devices that technically meet specifications but hinder productivity. Quantifying these experiences and making data-driven refresh decisions is no easy task.

Being forced into a technology refresh due to undesirable circumstances is no walk in the park. At a minimum, enterprises need a proactive strategy to align tech needs with business goals, but what if there was a solution to maximize savings while maintaining an ideal end-user experience?

Remove the guesswork with Aternity Smart Device Refresh

Is your IT team struggling to balance employee experience with the rising costs and complexities of refreshing devices? You’re not alone. Outdated devices slow productivity, frustrate employees, and create a flood of IT support tickets. Riverbed solves the challenges related to reducing IT Infrastructure costs, and a powerful way to start reducing these costs is by empowering IT with the intelligence needed to make astute device refresh decisions.

Aternity Smart Device Refresh takes a more innovative, data-driven approach. It collects real-time performance and health data across your entire device fleet, correlating it with user experience to identify which devices should be replaced, upgraded, or retained. Instead of relying on age-based cycles or guesswork, IT teams can make refresh decisions based on actual performance insights.

With the Smart Device Scenario Library, you can define refresh policies that align with business priorities, evaluate key factors such as device performance, hardware specs, application behavior, and warranty status, and immediately see the impact of different refresh strategies. The Action Planner then helps streamline execution by providing a structured, actionable plan.

Learn more

Read the IT Asset Cost Reduction Solution Brief to learn more about the cost reduction strategies Riverbed can actualize for your business. Aternity Smart Device Refresh is AIOps in action, optimizing employee experience while controlling IT budgets. Say goodbye to unnecessary upgrades and ineffective refresh cycles—watch the demo video below to understand how Aternity simplifies device management.