Security spending to peak within three years

Average IT security investment will peak at between eight and 12 per cent of corporate technology budgets in Europe by 2007, new research has claimed.

According to analyst Meta, spending will continue to increase steadily from current levels of around four per cent of overall IT budgets.

But the firm said that European businesses are not matching the US on spending, which it attributes to less attention regarding compliance issues and cyber-crime.

"Information security remains a top-five issue for chief information officers, and the debate regarding appropriate investment levels continues to rage," said Tom Scholtz, vice president at Meta, in a statement.

"Although capturing and benchmarking information security spending is complicated, security teams must model overall investment to track parity with industry peers and account for the cost of satisfying business requirements for managing information risk."