An independent research conducted by the request of the Intel company on 22 April 2009 revealed the degree of financial damage associated with a loss of a corporate laptop.
The objective of the research was to review information security issues with using a mobile office and to identify financial losses incurred by the company that had its corporate laptop lost or stolen. The results have revealed that the average cost of a lost corporate laptop amounts to 49246 dollars, and that applying technology measures of protection (such as disk encryption) substantially reduces these numbers. This confirms the need to ensure a particularly high information security level in the conditions of a mobile working environment.
Since a laptop provides more mobility and performance flexibility to employees, there is a tendency for more companies to prefer it to standard workstations. This practice is, however, associated with a risk of unintended loss of sensitive data, which can lead to a number of undesired consequences.
As the study has discovered, the major cost of such consequences to the company will not deal with a physical loss of a device, but rather with the valuable information contained therein. Primary costs include activities for regaining lost data, as well as those associated with a loss of data that cannot be restored.
Additionally, side-effect costs will include damage to the business reputation of a company that failed to assure appropriate safekeeping of its confidential data. Naturally, this can affect both the relationships with existing customers and ability to attract new customers, and cause tensions with the company’s partners. The mentioned amount also includes investigation, legal consultation and court proceedings costs. All these factors multiplied, the cost of a laptop loss reaches increasingly high rates.
During the research, 138 device loss or theft cases were investigated. The statistics has shown that the cost of a laptop loss or theft had a direct connection with the job title and position of its owner. As it has turned out, the highest financial damage is caused not by the loss of a top management laptop, but of that of a director or a manager (about twice as much). Also, the amount of damage is dependent on the time interval within which the loss had been detected since its occurrence. Normally, the faster the company responds to the situation, the smaller is the financial damage. However, the amount of a loss can be significantly higher if the laptop is deliberately stolen or the information contained in it is misused or gets into the hands of competitors.
The investigation emphasizes that appropriate protection measures could have prevented many data loss cases. Among those, disk encryption is quoted to be one of the most reliable means of ensuring information security in a mobile working environment.
To read more about the investigation “Cost of a Lost Notebook”, follow the link:
http://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-3076
