Employees lax on corporate data security

More than half (55 percent) of employees store work-related files in locations other than on a shared computer network.

A survey has found 49 percent of PC users store corporate files in multiple locations, with 21 percent using a memory stick, therefore compounding the risk further.

That's just for starters. Fourteen percent of employees admit to storing company material on their laptop's hard drives and nine percent on personal devices not owned by their workplace, while eight percent use portable hard drives and seven percent use mobile devices to keep hold of emails, files and documents, according to research by Dynamic Markets on behalf of enterprise content management company Tower Software.

Furthermore, one percent of respondents employed by the 300 companies in the UK taking part in the survey were unsure which of these locations they had stored work-related files on.

The research makes alarming reading for companies, when an estimated 8,500 mobile devices are lost by UK business travellers in the country's airports every year.