Hopefully you won’t lose this amount of data.
I wrote a long time ago about the value of the data on a laptop being worth more than the hardware. That’s certainly true for me, and I very much worry more about losing the data on my devices than the any of the devices themselves. I use sync services to keep a backup of most things, but I still worry about losing any of my bits.
There was a large study competed recently, called The Billion Dollar Lost Laptop Program, which examined 329 organizations. The idea was to find out the economic costs of lost laptops related to various public and private entities. The conclusion? The average value of a lost laptop, just one laptop, is $49,000. The conclusions say that least expensive part of losing a laptop of replacing the hardware.
As we would expect, most losses occurred away from the office, however it’s not known how many of these losses might be targeted thefts. Many of the losses did occur through theft, which is disturbing when most of these disks did not have encryption in place. This was true even when confidential data was contained on the laptop. It is nice to see that companies that realize they were targets of theft, as opposed to losses, typically do use encryption.
As the study shows, there are a lot of costs that go into replacing a laptop. Many people don’t think of all of these costs, and even if the costs are double what they should be, these are still substantial costs for companies to absorb. The costs will only go up in the future, especially as more and more people move from desktop workstations to laptops.
The one positive note? Encrypting the laptop almost cuts the loss in half. A good reason to require encryption on all laptops.
Steve Jones
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Voice of the DBA 
So true.
As data professionals, it is our responsibility to ensure that we are aware of the problems that arise from improper handling of data. the data we handle is taken care off.But, in-spite of all this we see a few people taking a lackadaisical attitude towards security, costing the organisations we work for millions in losses and most importantly their credibility.
Like, you mentioned in your earlier post ‘Hacked’, people seem to be the weakest link in the whole security process.
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“Encrypting the laptop almost cuts the loss in half.”
Is that because the act of putting in an encryption system makes you more aware of data loss issues, and therefore more likely to do something proactive to make sure that you’re not as badly affected?
In my case, I got protected because my old laptop started to fail, and I wanted to make sure that the data was off-site somewhere, just in case the unthinkable happened – not loss of the laptop, per se, but loss of the drive that hosted the data.
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