Ever wonder what it costs the company when a worker loses a laptop? Would you believe that it is nearly $50,000?

“A typical lost or stolen laptop costs employers $49,246, mostly due to the value of the missing intellectual property or other sensitive data,” according to a story in the San Jose Mercury News that reported on a study commissioned by tech giant Intel.

The five-month study that was conducted for Intel by the Michigan-based Ponemon Institute, “examined 138 laptop-loss cases suffered over a recent 12-month period by 29 organizations, mostly businesses but also a few government agencies. It said laptops frequently are lost or stolen at airports, conferences and in taxis, rental cars and hotels.”

“About 80 percent of the typical cost—or a little more than $39,000,” according to the Mercury News story, “was attributed to what the report called a data breach, which can involve everything from hard-to-replace company information to data on individuals. Companies then often incur major expenses to prevent others from misusing the data. Lost intellectual property added nearly $5,000 more to the average cost. The rest of the estimated expense was associated with such things as investigative costs, lost productivity and replacing the laptop.”

As staggering as the $50,000 figure is—if you really believe it—even more staggering is the variation in the dollar loss for stolen or lost laptops that were included in the study. The individual losses associated with stolen or lost laptops in the study varied from a reasonable (and understandable) $1,213 to an out-of-this-world (and hard to believe) estimate of $975,527.

Wonder about the reason for the huge variation in lost-laptop costs? According to the study, “The faster the company learns that a laptop is lost, the lower the average cost …  If a company discovers the loss in the same day, the average cost is $8,950. If it takes more than one week, the average cost rises significantly to approximately $115,849.”

That still doesn’t explain the near-million-dollar estimate for a single lost laptop, but it does explain why Intel linked up with the Ponemon Institute for this study: It’s because the computer chip maker has recently developed technology that companies can use to make notebooks harder to steal. That technology, according to the Mercury News story, can help make a laptop inoperative when it is lost or stolen.

Clearly, organizations have a strong interest in protecting their proprietary information that workers may have on their laptops, and Intel of course has a vested interest in marketing a technical solution to the problem. But as I have noted here before, there are a lot more ways that sensitive company information can walk out the door—such as when workers lose their jobs and decide to take it with them.

There is another solution: strong and specific HR policies that clearly delineate how employees are to handle their laptops and the sensitive information they may have on them. Too few organizations focus on that aspect of the problem, and it’s why you hear so many stories of a worker having their laptop filled with company and customer data getting stolen out of the back seat of their car.

Intel’s technical solution is a good one, but the skeptical side of me says it’s just an easy way to avoid having HR truly manage this problem with strong policies, training and an everyday focus on the issue. And, no technical solution can possibly account for human nature and the inherent ability of humans to do something stupid at the worst possible time.

Without strong HR involvement in managing the lost laptop and data security side of the equation, all a technical fix does is lull workers and management into a false sense of security about this problem—until a crisis erupts when the next lost laptop gets breached.

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