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Lost laptops cost companies dearly: study
San Francisco (AFP) April 24, 2009 Today's mobile workforce is putting precious business secrets at risk, with lost or stolen laptop computers costing companies dearly, according to the Ponemon Institute. A Ponemon study backed by chip giant Intel found that losing a laptop costs a firm on average 49,246 dollars after accounting for data loss, intellectual property, replacement, lost work time and legal expenses. "An increasingly mobile workforce is putting corporations' sensitive and confidential information at great risk," researchers said in the study, which was released this week. "It is the Information Age and employees are carrying more information on their laptops than ever before." So-called "power-users" of corporate data are losing laptop computers in taxis, rental cars, hotels, airports, pubs, and conference centers, according to the research. Ponemon's findings indicate that while senior executives are higher on the corporate ladder, the cost to companies of their lost laptops is typically less than half that of mobile computers lost by managers or directors. The average cost of a lost laptop for a senior executive was pegged at just shy of 28,500 dollars while misplaced machines of managers or directors cost firms on average about 61,000 dollars, Ponemon determined. Finding out quickly about missing laptops enables companies to "significantly" mitigate the cost of the loss, according to the study. When companies learned a laptop was gone on the day it disappeared, the average loss was 8,950 dollars. Not learning of the loss for a week raised the cost more than tenfold to nearly 116,000 dollars. Lost laptops that had copies of files stored in backup systems proved to cost firms on average approximately 70,000 dollars while missing machines without backup cost companies 39,250 dollars. "One plausible reason for this is that the backup makes it easier to confirm the loss of sensitive or confidential data," Ponemon researchers wrote. "In other words, it could be the ignorance-is-bliss hypothesis." The cost of losing a laptop was typically reduced by 20,000 dollars if data stored in it was encrypted. The Institute bills its Cost of a Lost Laptop study as a first in estimating the full cost of lost or stolen laptop computers. Ponemon researchers analyzed 138 cases in which organizations in the United States experienced laptop loss or theft in the past 12 months. Share This Article With Planet Earth
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