Guardian’s IT Packing and Logistics services are all about getting your IT assets from A to B without any damages or loss in value. “Secure IT Packing and Logistics” is the umbrella term for packing and shipping high-value IT assets. At Guardian Data Destruction, we’ve been shipping IT Assets securely for more than twenty years.
Watch the video of some of our best practices or … read the transcript below.
Defining Secure IT Packing and Logistics
Each project and customer has a different interpretation of secure IT logistics and protective packing. Listed below are common requirements that our customers ask for to ensure that their IT assets are packed and delivered as they want them to be:
- Designated Guardian POC (point of contact)
- Black shrink wrap for privacy
- Complete documentation including chain of custody, asset transfer forms (ATFs), before and after photography
- A partner that can handle any size load (a single hard drive, a few pallets of full truckload)
- In-transit security seals, locks, tags and/or security tape
- 24-hour response time
- Packing to the Statement of Work (SOW)
- White glove packing levels including blanket wrap, foam, bubble wrap and cushioning
- Gaylord packing for R2 and e-Stewards recycling
- Pallet stacking limitations
- Thorough communication: confirmations, truck arrival, loading status, truck departure, in-transit status reports, expected delivery date and time
- Immediate notification of changes or concerns: delays, schedule changes, quantity discrepancies, etc.
Understanding logistics vs shipping (and why that’s important for high-value IT assets) >
Expanding Secure IT Packing and Logistics
There are few jobs that are cut and dry: pack it, pick it up, deliver it, boom. Because companies have such a wide range of IT equipment (servers, data center racks, laptops, tablets, monitors, copiers, desktop computers, etc.), reuse and redeployment plans and so many different lease and purchase contracts to manage, we often have pack and ship projects bundled or expanded with these options to streamline processes and vendor management:
- Equipment audits and verifications (unique identifier)
- Custom crating for odd-sized or extremely fragile equipment
- Shock pallets for vibration reduction and movement sensitivity
- Inside delivery, unpack, placement and debris removal
- Time-specific pickups
- Onsite project management
- Reverse/return logistics
- Asset sort to recycling, ITAD/VAR or other designee
- Inventory management and reporting
- Short term and long term warehousing
- Swap outs and roll outs
- GPS tracking
- Point-to-point transport
- Background and security checks (personnel)
- Cross docking at our warehouse
- Consolidation, sort and repacking
- Multi-stop pick-up and deliveries
- Data center decommissioning and relocations
- Data destruction (shredding, erasure and degaussing of of hard drives, magnetic tape and SSDs)
- Factory resets of switches and devices
- Grading and testing
Common questions about logistics our customers ask >
Secure IT Packing and Logistics: watch three examples
There’s no better way to understand secure packing and logistics than visualization! In this video, Glenn Laga walks through the Guardian Data Destruction warehouse to show three common examples of secure IT packing and logistics of high-value assets: Â
- custom crating
- black shrink-wrapped pallets of consolidated equipment
- black shrink-wrapped data center racks (empty and loaded)
Secure IT Packing and Logistics = Peace of Mind
We recommend that ITADs, VARs, MSPs and resellers work with their customers to understand and define the criteria for secure IT asset packing and transport. Whether it’s a broad standardization or a job-by-job definition, the goal is to develop a standard that reduces risk while maintaining equipment value.
If you’re not feeling confident when your IT equipment is being shipped from place to place, it could be time to reevaluate service providers before the next data center or refresh is planned.
For questions about our IT asset packing and logistics services or to ensure that your provider is doing you right, reach out to the Guardian Data Destruction IT Packing and Logistics Group here. Or give us a call at 888-556-9473. Whether it’s high value, high security or pallets bound for R2 recycling, we will get your assets to the final destination as planned and without damage or loss in value.
Video Transcript
Today we’re talking about secure IT Packing and Logistics. Here’s a great example: this was a consolidation of 15 different locations where we picked up high-value product, brought it back to the warehouse for an audit and testing then re-palletized it to go back to a remarketing center. It’s also an example
of secure packing. We use black shrink wrap so nobody’s able to see it. All pallets will be labeled, then cross-docked and shipped to the final destination.
Another example of our packing and logistics also part of our decommissioning services. We go onsite, we’ll pick up fully loaded racks that can be either custom crated or we use our existing crates that we have in stock. We will load the rack into the crate, secured properly with foam on the sides.
We also have the ability to send our server lift to the sites where we need to safely de-rack heavier IT equipment from the bottom or the top of the racks. We use the server lifts for that.
Here’s another great example of IT packing and logistics. These are empty racks with a few different devices in them or basically an empty rack. We will shrink-wrap them and then move them out of the data center either to recycling or to remarketing — whatever the customer’s choice. But we do use shrink wrap and they’re labeled and transported to their final destination.
Thank you.
