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"When the laptop is moved from a dedicated office or zone then it sends an alert to the security officer, just to notify them. If it moves from a secondary zone then the software performs a decommission," says Dean Bates, CTO of Virtuity, the company behind BackStopp software.

This "decommission" involves the data on the hard disk being overwritten seven times, in line with US military standards on data protection.

"The data really is gone, you can't get the data back," explains Bates.

The system can determine the position of hardware in a number of different ways; using Wi-Fi, GSM or RFID chips.

The BackStopp package can also take images of the thief with an integrated webcam, and transmit them back to the owner.

The software starts at £10 per user, per month for the Wi-Fi solution, but larger enterprise installations using RFID chips are priced on a project by project basis.

"When we first started out we were thinking about financial institutions and governments, but it's really quite a broad product," claims Bates, suggesting that the system could find use in a range of businesses that deal with sensitive data.