What is the most secure way to mitigate the theft of corporate information from a laptop that was left in a hotel room?

A BIOS password can be bypassed by removing the CMOS battery to reset firmware settings, or by physically extracting the hard drive and connecting it to a different machine.

Encrypting the hard drive with a solution such as BitLocker ensures all data at rest is protected by cryptographic keys, making it unreadable to anyone without the correct credentials or recovery key. Unlike software-based access controls, encryption cannot be bypassed by booting from external media or transplanting the drive to another system. This directly and technically neutralizes the threat posed by physical theft of the hardware.

An OS logon password can be circumvented by booting from external media such as a USB drive, granting direct filesystem access without any authentication.

Backing up data protects against data loss but does nothing to prevent an attacker from reading the original unencrypted data remaining on the stolen laptop.