Surprised by these figures? I doubt it! If you're an IT manager you'd have been there. In-fact you're users have probably lost more laptops than you can remember? Surveys show that any large organisation lose between 3-5% of their laptops every year. Relaying laptop theft stories in the local pub is almost as common-place as people boasting how much their houses have shot-up in price over the last two years. However, with an increasingly mobile workforce, often using privately bought mobile devices, the board and IT departments have to take greater notice of who is carrying what around with them and take a rain check of the damage that could be caused if this information was lost and broadcast to the outside world. It is often fine when company information just resides on PCs and servers in an office as the IT departments have far greater control over the information and what is being sent out. Now the same information is being carried out of the office, left in bars or restaurants, at the back of taxis or trains and most commonly forgotten in airports, the IT manager has a nightmare job on his/her hands.
Insuring against hardware theft is rapidly becoming pointless and expensive and few companies bother to take out policies because the premiums are now so high. Plus, companies are now realising that the true cost of a stolen item of hardware is not the device itself, but the information it contains. No company are without laptops, PDAs or smart phones these days, so if you want to make sure your company does not become another statistic or victim of data theft here are a few golden rules you may want to follow.
The link for this article located at net-security.org is no longer available.
