But businesses must do more then merely keeping tabs on their equipment. Wherever sensitive data is stored, it must be protected since it can easily fall into the wrong hands.

One of the best ways to protect this valuable information is through data encryption, and now you can do it for free. TrueCrypt which is distributed under an open-source license, is one of the best encryption programs available on the Web. It is also easy to install and use on your computer.

So now there really is no excuse for proper data protection.

According to a recent study sponsored by Dell conducted by PC security researcher Larry Ponemon, business travelers lose about 12,000 PCs each week in US airports (that works out to approximately 600,000 a year!), and more than 65% of these laptops are never recovered. Though most of these PC’s (53%) contain confidential business information, 65% of those who carry it do not take steps to protect it, and 16% of the professionals polled said that if they their laptops were “lost when traveling on business,” they would do “nothing.”

These statistics are staggering to say the least. It underscores a general lack of education and attentiveness to data security among business professionals and the companies they work for.

But the very presence of this apathy is puzzling. Businesses these days face many internal and external threats that can compromise their sensitive data. Given the fact that a business’ credibility and value is often determined by how well it can secure this information, the question is why is this happening?

Dell published the results of the survey in conjunction with an announcement of several new, reasonably-priced PC security services including, laptop tracking and recovery, remote data delete, and hard drive data recovery.

All these services will certainly make it easier for businesses to secure the information on their employees’ laptops, but it seems to be a band-aid solution to a problem of attitude.