What does a LOST laptop cost?

Much has been made in the past 3-5 years regarding the attractiveness of laptops, and dwindling purchase cost premium over desktops. Laptops are more popular than ever. What people often forget is that there are higher costs of ownership in laptops, and one of those is the "risk cost" associated with having company data out there in the world.

Laptops are more easily broken or lost/stolen, and we have certainly found that they are FAR more likely to contain data that has not been backed-up. Laptops are on the network with the server less often, and when they are the users usually want to be 100% productive (won't understand the performance hit while their data synchronizes).

This combination of fragility/lose-ability of the systems, plus the "untethered" nature of the data makes for a very dangerous combination.

Here's a great article about the cost of a lost laptop. Some of it's probably exaggerated/overblown, but the fact remains that data security and backup are the biggest challenges when dealing with a laptop-mobile workforce.