The Hidden Cost of Peripheral Sprawl: What SMBs Don’t Know About Their Own Hardware

Which Peripherals Create the Biggest Security Gaps?

Marc Laliberte, head of security operations at WatchGuard, says the riskiest untracked peripherals are USB storage, thumb drives and portable solid-state drives.

“They cost twelve dollars, nobody logs them, they never touch your MDM, and they walk out the door in a pocket,” he explains.

Unlike a laptop, a portable drive may never appear in a directory or device management system. It can still carry customer records, financial information or other sensitive data outside of the organization.

From Huang’s perspective, the riskiest categories are devices with firmware and network connectivity that don’t get regularly updated or patched.

These can include networked printers, scanners and multifunction printers, webcams and conferencing hardware, and docking stations/KVMs with network pass-through.

To make matters more complicated, support risks increase as the device mix expands. Unlabeled equipment and incompatible models turn routine tickets into investigations, while IT teams must maintain more drivers, adapters and replacement parts.

READ MORE: Learn how a small manufacturer used managed services to control and secure endpoints.

How Can SMBs Calculate the Cost of Peripheral Sprawl?

A useful calculation for the cost of peripheral sprawl combines the cost of IT labor, employee downtime, duplicate purchases, unused equipment, replacement hardware and overlapping warranties.

Companies should also account for the time required to support mismatched models and the remediation costs that can follow an audit failure.

“Looking at your ticket system reveals connectivity failures, driver mismatches and device-not-working incidents,” Bertot says. “Multiplying these by your IT team’s loaded cost per hour exposes the true operational tax.”

Help desk records can reveal which device categories and models repeatedly consume support time, while purchasing and warranty data can then show where standardization would eliminate waste.

What Controls Can SMBs Implement Without Enterprise IT Asset Management?

Laliberte explains that a single purchasing channel gives IT an opportunity to approve each device, capture its serial number and assign it to an employee before deployment.

Standardizing models also reduces compatibility problems and makes it practical to maintain spare equipment.

“A lightweight asset tag system — even a simple barcode or QR sticker plus a spreadsheet — covering device, owner, purchase date and warranty would help many SMBs improve their peripheral management,” Huang says.

That inventory should be connected to onboarding and offboarding procedures, supported by quarterly office walk-throughs and remote employee verification.

If maintaining those processes begins diverting IT from security and modernization projects, a lifecycle services provider such as CDW can centralize procurement, deployment, tracking and recovery.

“The real question is whether your IT team is building strategic capability or firefighting device problems,” Bertot says.