A survey of 2,800 IT managers has shown that most are planning further increases in security budgets for next year.

Around 70 per cent of those questioned are planning to increase security spending in 2008.

A quarter of these plan to spend between seven and 10 per cent of their total budget on security, and 13 per cent plan to spend more than 15 per cent.

"The biggest challenge over the next five years is the ability to find vulnerabilities in systems and prevent unauthorised network access," said Arne Klein, vice president of marketing at security hardware vendor Astaro, and author of the report.

"The overall rise in IT spending on security will continue unabated, with managed security services gaining ground in almost every application."

The biggest concerns highlighted in the survey were vulnerability assessment, leakage of confidential data and protecting web applications from worms or hacker attacks via SQL/command injection.

The survey data indicated that UK companies are lagging behind their counterparts in the US, where security is predicted to take up 20 per cent of budgets.

It also backed up other research showing that UK businesses are not taking some security areas seriously, particularly wireless security.