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Today's IT professional is tasked with multiple and sometimes competing interests regarding IT Asset Management, amongst which Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) features heavily.

While delivering value in the total cost of hardware and software ownership will always remain a key consideration, GRC concerns are gaining significance. Managing through-life IT systems, ensuring data is protected, ensuring compliance with IT, data protection and environmental legislation and providing an ethical and sustainable solution is required. All whilst trying to keep an eye on emerging trends, technology and legislative changes, and changing company priorities.

This challenging landscape faces IT professionals across all types and sizes of organisations. One example of a forthcoming change in this landscape will be the European Commission's Circular Economy Strategy. Anticipated in December this year, it is expected to set ambitious new goals, including:

• Policies that specifically promote the reuse of products
• Particular emphasis on the role of producers to create goods that can be easily repaired and recycled
• Establishing specific resource efficiency targets for materials where scarcity looms or the environmental impact of extraction is serious.

What is the ‘Circular Economy’ and what does this mean for your organisation? We live in a cradle-to-grave economy products have a 'take, make and dispose' lifecycle - linear, with a beginning and an end. As we live on a planet with finite resources, this is unsustainable. Organisations are working to reduce the costs, risks and environmental impact of this lifecycle by moving towards a circular economy through reuse, repair and refurbishment, remanufacturing, and recycling of IT and other assets.

The Circular Economy concept challenges the traditional lifecycle by looking at how we can feed products, components, untapped resources and recycled materials back into the appropriate value chains after their useful life as one product - to become another useful product; thereby closing the loop and making a circle.

It sounds so simple. However, in practice, there are challenges, and a number of real and perceived barriers that restrict acceptance of the circular economy concept within the IT industry. We all have a duty of care to sustain global resources. Yet this should not be at the cost of your ability to protect business-critical data, control business IT assets or manage your budget.

These considerations will not stop you innovating to deliver a Circular, or Cradle-to-cradle model, in your IT Asset Disposition. Investing in a circular economy model, working with the right partner, will enable you to deliver value back into your business, with guaranteed data security and regulatory compliance, all whilst creating a sustainable business model.

Regulatory agencies globally are constantly and steadily challenging organisations, whether through redefining policies on asset and material types or tightening restrictions on trans-boundary movement of specific materials, or through specific, strict reporting standards.

Compliance with changing regulations is a hidden burden when considering the circular approach to IT Asset Disposition, but one that cannot be ignored. In the EU, where electronic take-back legislation is gaining maturity, it is still estimated that only 40% of eWaste take-back is managed and reported through official channels. In North America, it is more like 12% and around 1% in Australia… this is in the developed world. Across the globe, there is still a long way to go, in terms of changes in legislation, and the more important aspect of enforcing legislation. All this will have a significant impact on any enterprise that has an obligation to reuse or recycle their assets, to watch these regulatory changes and also to comply.

When managing your IT assets, it's vitally important to track, understand and comply with these challenges, while also monitoring and responding to the changing governance, risk and compliance landscape.