IT Staffing Crisis Leaves Organizations Blind to Hardware Assets, Creating Security Gaps

Teqtivity analysis reveals how lean IT teams struggle to track devices, leading to unreturned equipment and exploitable vulnerabilities.

Feb. 21, 2026 at 1:07am

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A new analysis by Teqtivity, an IT asset management company, has found that as IT teams get leaner, organizations are losing visibility into their hardware assets. This is resulting in 'ghost devices', unreturned equipment from departing employees, and security blind spots that create exploitable vulnerabilities. The core issue is that understaffed IT teams cannot manually track assets at scale, leaving many devices unprotected and unmanaged.

Why it matters

Data breaches increasingly involve basic failures like unreturned hardware and unpatched devices. Organizations face significant costs per incident, yet many could prevent these breaches with better asset visibility. When organizations don't know what devices they have, security tools can't protect them, as untracked devices don't receive patches and can maintain active credentials long after employees leave.

The details

Industry data shows IT teams now commonly support well over 100 employees per administrator. At this ratio, manual asset tracking becomes unsustainable. The analysis found that as IT teams thin out, basic asset management tasks fall apart, with organizations struggling to maintain accurate device inventories, track equipment through employee departures, and identify which devices are deployed where. The majority of organizations report departing employees who failed to return company equipment, yet many companies cannot fully disable access to these devices because they've lost track of what devices exist.

  • The analysis examined industry workforce data, asset management practices, and security trends as of February 2026.

The players

Teqtivity

An IT asset management company that provides automated solutions to help organizations gain visibility into their hardware assets.

Hiren Hasmukh

The CEO of Teqtivity, who emphasizes the importance of automated asset management for lean IT teams to maintain security and compliance.

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What they’re saying

“You can't secure what you can't see. When one person is responsible for tracking hundreds of devices across remote teams, things slip. Former employees keep laptops. Equipment gets deployed and forgotten. Nobody knows what's actually out there.”

— Hiren Hasmukh, CEO, Teqtivity

“Security tools only work on devices you know about. A former employee's laptop sitting at home with VPN access isn't in your endpoint management system. It's a ghost asset—and a security liability.”

— Hiren Hasmukh, CEO, Teqtivity

“Lean teams need automation. Manual tracking doesn't scale. Automated asset management gives a small team visibility into thousands of devices globally. That's not extra technology—that's making security possible with the team you have.”

— Hiren Hasmukh, CEO, Teqtivity

What’s next

Teqtivity plans to continue analyzing industry trends and providing insights to help organizations address the growing IT staffing crisis and improve their hardware asset visibility and security.

The takeaway

As IT teams become leaner, organizations are struggling to maintain accurate inventories of their hardware assets, leading to security vulnerabilities from untracked and unprotected devices. Automated IT asset management solutions can help lean teams regain visibility and control over their hardware, enabling them to secure their environments despite limited staffing resources.