Here are some scary stats for any company with employees who travel:

Roughly 637,000 laptops are lost at American airports each year, according to a recent study by the Ponemon Institute. That’s about 12,250 every week. Only 65% of them are ever reclaimed, said the survey of airport officials.

That’s scary news, especially since most employer-owned laptops contain some kind of confidential data about the company, its customers, its employees or all three.

What’s the solution? The U.S. Federal Trade Commission says that leaving laptop in public view is like displaying a bundle of greenbacks. Their advice is to tell your road warriors to hang onto portable computers as if they are wads of cash.

Your company’s IT department can take steps to protect the data so it can’t be accessed by just anyone who comes across the computer. With the uptick in how many laptops workers now use as opposed to desktops, plenty of vendors are getting into the laptop security game.

Among the players in this space:

• Dell’s new service for commercial customers that includes GPS to locate and recover systems
• FTC-recommended Absolute Software Corp.’s LoJack, which tracks down a stolen laptop when it’s connected to the Internet, and
• Lenovo’s upcoming ThinkPad SL, that offers the LoJack option.

Also, a little reminder about the basics before employees leave for a trip (i.e., “Don’t forget your laptop at the security checkpoint”) can go a long way.

To read more from the FTC on laptop security, download their PDF on the topic here.

Tags: airports, laptops, lost data