Why did values increase overall at Cascade in 2017?

While the value of a particular device model may decrease over time, overall average resale prices increased at Cascade as newer equipment is refreshed each year. In addition, the following factors contirbuted to a new trend of increased resale values . . .

The quality of enterprise gear is better than ever (devices last longer). Often times, a replacement of the hard drive, a new laptop battery, and a fresh operating system install gives new life to a well built enterprise level computing device.

Laptops and desktops are not obsoleted by software upgrades like they used to be. Windows 10 is more efficient in using computing resources and open source software can also be installed on older devices.

Cascade’s clients are taking better care of their equipment and maintaining more consistent refreshes. This enhances resale opportunities and values which we share with our ITAD clients, which further incentivizes them to get more quality resellable equipment to us.

It's clear that security is the number one consideration when retiring IT assets. But does that mean value for those assets needs to be sacrificed? Not necessarily. The NIST 800-88 Media Sanitization Guidelines provide a comprehensive approach to managing security risks and allow for the reuse of devices when properly sanitized.

The majority of Cascade customers allow us to sanitize their data on media (hard drives, solid state drives and flash media) to the NIST Clear and/or Purge levels. This process fulfills their data security and privacy compliance requirements while allowing them to earn a share of the drive's resale revenue. Sanitization is performed either through a drive over-write process (whereby all sectors are written to "0s") or through the application of Secure Erase or another Cyrptographic Erase method. Cascade's specialized tools and professional experience allows us to identify and apply appropriate sanitization methods to Clear or Purge all data from devices. Cascade also independently certifies our data sanitization tools and sends various media to a third party forensic analysis firm to valiate the destruction processes.

Over the years, more clients have become comfortable with the electronic sanitization process for data destruction. This has greatly contributed to the multi-year double-digit increases in rebate returns to Cascade clients. For those media that cannot be electronically sanitized, Cascade can still shred, degauss, crush, and/or wafer the devices for physical destruction. Learn more about our secure destruction services.