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lost and found?

Joe: So...i lost my laptop...what now?
Admin: You LOST your laptop?
Joe: Umm..yea..I left it on the metro...the bag's gone now. I don't know what to do.
Admin: You LOST your laptop?
Joe: Well..i misplaced it.
Admin: Okay, well we don't get too many of these calls. I'll have to file a report. Contact your local computer group and they'll set you up with a temporary computer.
Over the next two hours, he got calls from upper management and the head of HR.
"There's confidential information in there. How could you lose it?'
Joe: "Well, I'm sorry. It won't happen again"
HR: "Yeah well it better not."
The firm went back and forth with him for an entire day, making him feel real guilty. Now there's a slide in every general firm presentation on laptop security.

Lost files are another issue. This happens once every few months, and the region gets a general email asking if anyone found these files.

The good thing is, with laptops...it is extremely encrypted and protected and all the information is backed up automatically in some general server. So a new laptop with all the previous information stored in a lost laptop can be up and running in a day.

But with files, that just sucks. Best we can do is lock it up in boxes. Ideally, everything should be electronic, but there's no way the old school will allow that to happen. Some firms do have everything electronically stored, so the retrieval process is much easier.

Good luck redoing all the work done on paper. For the few documents I've had to recreate, it sucks..it really does.
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Comments

Anonymous said…
Do they need to worry so much about a lost laptop? Apart from having to re-do work if you haven't backed files up to a remote location, the firm doesn't lose much, unless you have some papers with notes. Otherwise, they should just be glad if you didn't have paper copies in your laptop bag. The laptop itself can't be worth much in the big picture, because they're not exactly top-of-the-line anyway.
February 12, 2009 at 8:41 AM
notfordisplay said…
The lost laptop is not so much an issue for us as it is for our clients. There is sensitive information in there that can do a lot of damage if it's in an investor's hands, since it's not public information yet.
February 15, 2009 at 10:24 AM
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