Half of the business managers recently interviewed admitted to disabling the encryption option on their laptops, according to a new study.

Absolute and Ponemon Institute joined forces to issue a research paper called the Human Factor in Laptop Encryption: UK Study, where it was understood that a worrying percentage of workers were undermining data protection strategies.

Founder and chairman of the organisation Larry Ponemon said user behaviour was one of the primary reasons as to why data leaks were occurring and found it hard to believe the results his company gathered.

He continued: "These statistics are especially disconcerting when combined with our recent studies demonstrating that lost or stolen laptops are the number one cause of data loss, with three out of four companies experiencing a data breach when a laptop has been lost or stolen."

Yesterday, Brocade revealed that data centre security is still not considered a top priority despite the amount of companies which had experienced attacks on their network servers.

More than half of small businesses (53 per cent) believe that the most important benefit of outsourcing is guaranteed response times for IT support. London-based Connect conducted the research in 2007.