Business Laptops Cost $50,000 to Replace
Software is the most costly part of lost or stolen laptops
We’ve heard many times over stories of stolen laptops. Perhaps we’ve even been victims of a stolen laptop, and those of us who have, know that we lose more than just the cost of the hardware.
According to a study conducted by the Ponemon Institute, notebooks lost or stolen in airports, taxis and hotels around the world cost corporate owners an average of $49,246. Clearly the cost of the hardware is just a small fraction of the value, with the most of the losses coming from data stored on the hard drive.
Intel commissioned the study to “better understand the problems and solutions associated with lost notebooks,” or perhaps to better market its own anti-theft technologies, such as Centrino 2 with vPro.
The sooner a company discovers that one of its notebooks has gone missing, the lower the costs associated with the loss. According to the study, the average cost of a notebook discovered missing the same day lost is $8,950. After more than a week, the cost can jump to $115,849.
While snatching the laptop of a company’s top leader may seem to be the holy grail of corporate espionage, the study found that the CEO’s computer isn’t the one that’s most costly. The study estimates a senior executive's notebook value at $28,449, while a director or manager's notebook is worth $60,781 and $61,040, respectively.
Through analysis of 138 instances of lost and stolen notebooks, the study came to its figures after taking into account costs associated with replacement, detection, forensics, data breach, lost intellectual property, lost productivity, and legal, consulting and regulatory expenses. Data breach alone represents 80 percent of the cost.
Not surprisingly, encrypted laptops mitigate the loss of a corporate laptop by a significant sum. The study found that a lost encrypted hard drive is valued at $37,443, compared with $56,165 for a non-encrypted version.
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hellwig Encrypt your laptops, restrict who gets to take thier laptops where, and for chrissake, make people store files on your network shares.Reply
First off, as American's we need to be less inclined to take our work with us out of the office. Less people taking laptops home means less chances of them getting lost or stolen.
Second, if we must take our laptops with us (off site business meetings or other work related travel), encrypt all your data, and only take what you'll need. I can't believe how many unencrypted government laptops with sensitive information get lost every year. Why does some census worker need 1 million SSNs on their laptop?
Finally, regardless of whether you use a laptop or desktop, always store you data on the network drives (assuming your company has them, and they should). There's no reason to lose a weeks worth of work when your harddrive dies because you don't like spending a few minutes before you leave work each day copying (or moving) your data to a network share. Network shares should be backed up and redundant, your Dell desktop certainly isn't. -
Marcus Yam Those are all sensible solutions and would cut down on loss of corporate data. Of course, a lot of that depends on actual user action and involvement -- and users can rarely be counted on to maintain the system that you described.Reply -
antilycus The problem is, and always will be, Management. Those who are NOT I.T. savy. They want it now and don't care about the security on the backend. And of course, NOBODY is held accountable in America which means there is no reason to come close to enforcing the rules, because HR wont do squat about it, if its a management/executive person.Reply -
Belardo Yep yep... I setup security up to want management is willing to deal with. They want it easy. They want to run Outlook (ugh), etc. After a while, you do your best and let them understand that there are pitfalls.Reply
By the way, WindowsXP encryption is almost useless. And of course business doesn't like vista for obvious reasons. Even Win7's recent security problem shows that almost any computer can be broken into.
It's all a matter of how much time a person is willing to spend to get to that data. BTW: Perhaps the most secure and deadly protection would be a self-destructing setup. If the pass-word is incorrect or its unable to "call home" so many times, it starts erasing data as much as possible (like during the log-in screen)... do a level1 to get it done quickly to make things difficult, then level 3 or 7.
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millerm84 Given physical access or even internet access no system is secure. Every IT manager should have that printed with 100+ point font banner in every executives' office. With that said and known all business infrastructure should be developed with only security in mind. Other wise they may as well post their information on the web and be done with it. Ease of use is only beneficial to hackers any manager or executive that has trouble with that should be confined to a type writer. Seriously....a type writer.Reply -
As IT staff we tend to see security as a single objective, and we need to remember that in business terms it's a trade off. What will the loss of data/time/hardware cost compared to the profit generated by an easy to use system.Reply
I'd also like to see where some of the numbers come from in this report. Most execs don't walk around with bank account information on their laptops, so I can only guess that this is 'lost work', and potential value of information. -
kingssman There's a Pokemon Institute?!Reply
Oh.. OHhhhhhh.. "Ponemon"...
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Gotta catch them all -
Upendra09 Business should all buy the laptops for their workers and disable the HDDs. Then that would force workers to save onto the companies network, or server. And if a ever a need comes that one needs to work at home on office work the company should offer a virtual pc setup where the HDDs are re-enabled and the next day when the person comes to work, the HDD is emptied into the server HDD. This is a simple and effective way to get rid of the problem with stolen laptopsReply