Study: Security spending to rise tenfold by 2011

Published by market researcher Gartner, the study predicts that companies will spend 4 percent of their revenues on information security in 2011, up from 0.4 percent this year.

The study takes into account the costs for people, hardware, software, external services and physical security to protect a business' critical information.

Roberta Witty, research director with Gartner, believes that by 2004, about four out of five companies will use the Internet as a key part of the business, and at least half will experience a financially significant loss as the result of Internet threats.

A Computer Security Institute study published earlier this year, in which 186 companies took part, found that the average loss to computer crime was US$2 million.

The CSI study found that computer viruses were the most common Internet threat to companies but that stolen trade secrets accounted for about half the financial losses.