Small businesses in IT must seriously consider the importance of encryption when storing sensitive or personal information on laptops and PCs, an expert warns.

Steve Cornish, a leading security consultant, emphasised how many people get complacent about the safety of personal effects on technological platforms, when all it takes is one plucky criminal to extract them and hold a person's life to ransom.

He said that encryption is the only way forward in protecting files directly.

Mr Cornish said: "The disadvantage of whole disk encryption is that you may well have to give your password to the repairer which means he has access to all the data on the machine."

He added that a more secure approach would be to use both file and folder encryption in conjunction with whole disk, as this provides the "ultimate data protection".

The comments follow an investigation from Sky News which found that certain computer repair shops are illegally accessing personal information on consumers' hard drives.

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.