I love my laptop. With its widescreen, built-in wireless, and ease of portability, I can plug in to work, friends, and other online genres anytime any place. That freedom feels good.

If your laptop has become your primary computer, its time to get serious about a growing issue: laptop theft. Mark Stone wrote a recent blog about the issue, and brought up some alarming statistics. In 2004, 600,000 laptops where stolen. The FBI indicates 97% of stolen laptops are never recovered. Moreover, annually laptop theft causes hardware losses of $700M and data loss of $5.4B.

Let’s face it, the smaller the business the more concentrated the value of the resources are, relatively speaking. So a small or medium sized business may think it will not happen to them, but it is just as likely and more costly than, say Exxon-Mobile losing 1 of the thousands of laptops their employees own. Think about it.

So, as a business owner what are you supposed to do? As Mark points out, one of the key issues is having a good security policy to deal with laptops and data. So what are some of the points that need to be looked?

Data Encryption – encryption is one of the keys to making sure a stolen laptop does not come back to harm you because of the stolen data. Good encryption programs make it easy to work with critical data and emails, and can allow you to get on networks knowing that the most important data is locked up tight.

Recovery and Back up – are laptop users part of your recovery and back-up scenario? If you loose some hardware it hurts, but it is easily replaceable. If you loose critical or proprietary data, even if encrypted, that users have to spend time recreating – you have not only lost productivity but your paying double for work. Make it a policy for laptop users to plug into the corporate network and get backed up on a regular basis.

VPN – Virtual Private Networks are a great way for business users to stay working on the business network, yet protected at the same time. If you think of data as a liquid and the internet as a clear pipe liquid moves through that all can see, think of VPNs as reinforced concrete pipes. Data is encrypted as it moves from point A to point B, ensuring that nobody who may be looking at it knows what it is.

Work with experts to figure out what is best for your environment. Security is only as good as a businesses willingness to enforce the policy. Security pros can help you set up solutions that are not only easy to implement but seamless to the user.