A recent survey has revealed that many decision makers in IT departments are not addressing the security of their information despite facing problems in 2008, it has been reported.

In the piece by Brocade, a data centre specialist, it was discovered that even though over half had admitted to being on the receiving end of a data breach, few were willing to put the money into securing their systems, Vnunet reported.

Mike Murphy, the European director of marketing at the company, said that security settings were often shunned due to the overall effect on company performance as well as the difficulty which many businesses find in deploying it.

He concluded: "Encryption is like insurance, in that there is no tangible return on investment. But nevertheless we are starting to see budgets shift this way."

Brocade is a leading provider of enterprise data centres and hopes to allow companies the chance to connect their performance and applications through this service.

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.