Law Office of Richard Kuslan LLC

The theft of a laptop presents more than a simple loss of an asset, especially when it holds confidential or valuable data, or work in progress.  Without regular backups, companies put themselves at risk.  

In a survey of more than 125 small businesses with 20 or fewer employees, Carbonite found that companies approach backups in a piecemeal fashion with a variety of physical devices, including thumb drives and CDs.  And it is usually the business owner, generally the one who has the least time available, who performs the back ups.  Continuous online storage, now available with adequate security and privacy for most applications, is a preventative measure that can pay for itself when something happens.  So, will it happen?

There are any number of causes of a computer outage, including, for example, human error, computer failure, software corruption and theft.  The Graziado Business Review reports that:

One study reports that a company that experiences a computer outage lasting for more than 10 days will never fully recover financially and that 50 percent of companies suffering such a predicament will be out of business within 5 years

David Smith, the survey's author, estimated the cost of each computer outage at approximately $4,000.  

But most surprising is the author's report of some 403,000 episodes of laptop theft, if only because so few companies make use of laptop theft prevention mechanisms, such as LoJack for Laptops or Prey.  This post on TechDirt leads to the marvelous story, told in Tweets, of the loss of his laptop to a thief, the method by which he tracked it down and the social media by which he retrieved it.  It alone should be enough to convince any business owner, usually a positive and optimistic person,  to spend a little time and money planning for the events that might negatively affect electronic assets and then proactively provide the necessary protection.