Laptop Tracking for Businesses – The Complete Guide

Overview

It’s no secret that the world’s most successful companies closely monitor their strategic assets. FedEx tracks every one of their delivery trucks and cargo jets around the globe. Citibank knows the real-time location, cash level and machine health of every ATM in their network. These tracking systems drive major efficiency gains, while protecting organizations from the cost and liabilities of losing assets.

Likewise, if your business depends on a mobile workforce – running apps, generating documents and handling data – then corporate laptops, smartphones and tablets are strategic assets that your IT team should be closely tracking.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Do you know where each of your IT assets are, who they’re assigned to, and who’s actually using them?
• Are your laptops encrypted before they enter service in the field? Do you have a central backup of encryption and recovery keys for every laptop?
• Are you ready to respond with countermeasures if a laptop is lost or compromised? Can you respond to a management request to lock down assets ahead of an employee termination or reduction-in-force?
• Can you produce an accurate audit of your IT assets and encryption state to comply with an audit or regulatory requirements? 

If you answered “no” to any of these questions, you could be doing more to protect your company and optimize its use of IT resources. A laptop tracking solution can put you in full control of your operation.

Why you should track business laptops

Beyond the obvious need to prevent asset loss, a laptop tracking solution allows you to visualize your IT operation, respond to security incidents, and meet the expectations of the C-suite and regulatory standards. Here are the top reasons why business laptop tracking is essential:

Know what you manage

How do you manage or secure an asset you don’t even know exists? A laptop tracking solution gives you visibility into your IT asset fleet and is a critical component of endpoint security.

Accurate resource deployment is essential for companies with a distributed workforce or multiple office locations. It ensures assets are available when and where they’re needed to optimize productivity and efficiency. With laptop tracking solutions, you can identify underutilized resources in your fleet and redistribute them to high-demand areas to minimize unnecessary investments.

Data from laptop tracking solutions also supports effective device lifecycle management and optimization of replacement and upgrade schedules to ensure an up-to-date and secure IT infrastructure.

Identify minor issues before they turn into major ones

Property owners install security cameras so they can collect evidence in the event of a break-in or for the deterrent effect they can provide. But the true value of security cams may be the footage they capture of near-misses: of would-be burglars squeezing through a small gap in a fence, or casing the property through a certain window. This information can be used to continually improve security measures.

Laptop tracking software serves the same purpose. Not only does it help with active incidents and investigations, it can also uncover suspicious activity or patterns – information that can then be used to improve security and prevent future incidents.

For example, you may notice an employee using a company laptop in countries where internet security can’t be assured, putting sensitive data at risk. This information enables you to take proactive action, such as contacting the employee, improving staff training, and providing secure methods for accessing the company network from unsafe locations.

You can also use your laptop tracking solution to detect VPN spoofing, where users attempt to mask their location with rogue VPN clients, posing significant security risks to the company. Laptop tracking software can help identify discrepancies between the reported and actual locations, allowing you to address non-compliance with security policies.

Corporate laptops are a major vector for cybercrime

Why do cybercriminals target corporate laptops? Because they contain critical information, including employee login credentials, URLs and IP addresses for corporate resources, VPN profiles, saved passwords for cloud apps, access to password management vaults, and locally stored data. Failing to safeguard your business laptops is like handing hackers the key to the kingdom.

Additionally, business laptops may contain intellectual property, financial records, trade secrets, and proprietary information. Criminals target these devices to steal your organization’s intellectual assets, threatening your competitive position in the marketplace. 

Cybercrime isn’t just perpetrated by hackers accessing sensitive data or networks. It can also be committed by a disgruntled or former employee tampering with or exfiltrating company data using their access privileges. Such insider threats are more common than you might assume, with 70% of laptop thefts involving a former employee or contractor.

Laptop tracking software allows you to promptly respond to cybercrime or insider threats to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive information that may lead to a data breach.

Your reputation and financial health are at stake

Every lost or stolen laptop is a potential data breach, depending on the actor and circumstances. While standard disk encryption practices protect data from outside actors, they offer no protection against insider actors. In the latter case, even an encrypted laptop is a potential data breach that may need to be disclosed to customers or regulators.

The outcomes of data breaches are costly. Besides hefty regulatory fines you may be subjected to, you must cover the costs of investigation, notification, remediation actions (e.g., credit monitoring for affected customers), legal procedures, and data recovery — impacting your company’s financial health for years. Perhaps the costliest consequence of a data breach is the erosion of your brand’s reputation and customer trust.

Laptop tracking software coupled with strong countermeasures can help you stop a potential data breach and avoid costly consequences.

Your boss expects it

C-suite executives are responsible for driving business performance and managing risks. The skyrocketing data security risks and the high costs of data breaches has resulted in more scrutiny on IT departments and their managed service providers (MSPs) to secure their companies’ digital and physical assets.

As the C-suite becomes more familiar with cybersecurity, executives will expect their IT staff to defend the organization on multiple fronts, including having basic capabilities to track IT assets and lock down compromised assets.

How to implement a business laptop tracking solution

Some organizations may attempt to track their IT assets with tools they already have. One is a manually-updated spreadsheet, which instantly starts to become inaccurate as assets start moving around. Another method is to use gadgets such as Airtags or GPS fobs physically attached to assets. However, these have inherent battery life issues and merely provide ‘dumb’ location, without crucial data such as IP address, user name, and hardware specs.

The best laptop tracking solution for nearly all organizations will be a software-based solution for several reasons:

• Laptop tracking software embedded in the OS eliminates the need for external devices and their associated battery life and physical removal risks.
• Software-based tracking leverages multiple location methods, such as WiFi triangulation, GPS, and IP databases, to achieve robust coverage, allowing you to track laptops in diverse environments.
• Integration with a laptop’s OS allows tracking software to continuously collect activity and asset data to help you understand device usage patterns.
• OS integration enables the software to do more than tracking, such as countermeasures to protect sensitive information on a laptop, adding an extra layer of security.

Features to look for in a laptop tracking solution

Real-time data

Old data is bad data. Avoid solutions with sensors or agents that report to the server on an intermittent schedule or interval, which will result in outdated or unreliable information. Instead, agents should communicate with real-time protocols to provide current and accurate data, and allow real-time issuance of commands during an incident.

Independent location service

Solutions that depend on the OS or web browser for location service may suffer from two issues:

• End users need to opt-in to activate the services, and human errors may impact tracking.
• The geolocation sources can be inadvertently or intentionally disabled.

As such, you should seek a laptop tracking solution that uses its own geolocation service. It should be enabled by default to ensure tracking isn’t reliant on end-user actions. This approach is more reliable and less susceptible to intentional interference. 

Multiple location methods

Relying on a single location method may affect tracking accuracy in some environments. For example, buildings, trees, tunnels, mountains, and even the human body may block GPS signals. Moreover, signals may reflect off buildings and walls, impacting their accuracy. 

The best laptop tracking solutions combine different sensors and location methods to enhance the location data’s accuracy and reliability. These include WiFi and cellular triangulation, GPS, MAC address correlation, and IP address tracking from multiple providers.

Tamperproof

Some tracking solutions are easy for end users to remove or tamper with, compromising reliability and effectiveness. Your laptop tracker should have multiple tamperproof mechanisms that prevent removal. 

Anti-theft countermeasures

Tracking and locating your assets is an important first step, but in the event of a loss, theft or other security incident, you need the ability to respond with robust countermeasures. Look for a solution that includes additional capabilities such as:

• File and folder lockdown: The ability to encrypt compromised assets to protect them from unauthorized users, including previously authorized users such as terminated employees.
• Drive lockout: A way to lock the hard drive to prevent access to the OS. Look for an unlock password option so that you can remotely unlock the drive once the threat has passed.

Geofencing

This feature provides the capability to monitor assets entering or leaving specific areas, such as an office location. Choose a laptop tracker that allows you to send you alerts when an asset leaves a geofence. You should also be able to set up a geofence to trigger anti-theft countermeasures. For example, you may want to set up your desktop PCs to automatically lock down if they leave the building they are assigned to.

Encryption management

No laptop should enter field service without being encrypted. A laptop tracking solution with enhanced features will help you enable and monitor the full disk encryption features built into the laptop OS, such as BitLocker for Windows, and FileVault for macOS.

Laptop tracking features to avoid

Some organizations make the mistake of adopting a consumer laptop recovery model that prioritizes device recovery over data security. Businesses should instead be focusing on data security and breach mitigation.

Organizations should also ensure that tracking methods don’t violate employees’ privacy. Intrusive tracking may diminish employee morale and trust — a culture built on surveillance is often counterproductive and harms the employee-employer relationship.

As such, your laptop tracking strategy should prioritize security and employee privacy, while avoiding these features:

Webcam snooping

Some tracking solution providers allow administrators to access a laptop’s webcam for theft investigations. However, this feature can easily be abused and cause an invasion of privacy. Unauthorized use of webcams raises ethical and legal concerns while diminishing employee trust.

Keystroke logging

This feature involves recording every keystroke made on a laptop and could result in IT overreach. Besides work-related data, keylogging may capture an employee’s personal information. It poses a significant privacy risk, potentially violating regulations and employee trust if sensitive information is collected. 

Lock screens

Some tracking solutions utilize an OS-resident lock screen, sometimes with audio alarms or flashing lights. Such features are consumer-oriented gimmicks and are easily defeated. A business-oriented solution is truly secure and unobtrusive.

Conclusion

An effective laptop tracking solution functions as a dashboard for your entire IT operation and, by extension, your organization’s workforce. You’ll be able to deploy resources efficiently and ensure the return of IT assets. You’ll protect your organization’s reputation, brand and IP from a major vector of cybercrime and insider crime. And you’ll identify potential security vulnerabilities before they turn into bigger issues.

With the right laptop tracking solution, you’ll be ready for security audits conducted by your customers and regulators, which are becoming more and more common. And you’ll be ready to answer any lockdown request from HR or the C-suite, which now expect such capabilities from IT.

Ready to implement a comprehensive device anti-theft program at your organization? Tether Endpoint Security Cloud can help.
Sign up for a free 30-day trial.