14 DAY TRIAL // It is a well-known fact that many mobile consumers and other electronics get stolen or just lost every year, in addition to those that just break, but in the case of laptops, things might be more serious than one may think.
Surveys are often undertaken by various parties and analysts, but it seems that, this time around, it was Intel that commissioned one, carried out by the Ponemon Institute.
As reports indicate, 329 US companies were included in the survey, and it was established that a worrisomely large percentage of the total 3.68 billion laptops get lost or stolen each year.
The percentage is of 2.3, meaning that 86,455 is the number of mobile computers that such companies need to replace.
Of this number of over 86,000, 25 percent were stolen, mostly after car break-ins, while another 15 were lost due to 'probable theft,' leaving the rest of 60% as having just been lost by the users.
The cost of the hardware itself is not the main problem here, since parts are not particularly hard to replace, not overly expensive.
What truly proves detrimental is the amount of intellectual property, legal expenses, worker productivity and lost data that each theft or loss drags along with it.
With an average cost of $49,246, this leads to company cost of about $2.1 billion each and every year.
This gets even more troubling once one realizes that, as the above percentage of 60% makes it quite clear, many of the losses were actually deemed easily preventable, which means it was the responsibility of the users themselves to be more careful.
It is also interesting to note that 7 percent of all laptops are lost during their operational lifetime.
All in all, corporations might have to consider offering rewards for lost machines and perhaps enforcing their policies regarding security and employee responsibility.