Security and virtualisation top the list of the UK government's IT agenda for 2008, according to the Government Solutions Seminar unveiled by Citrix at Infosec Europe 2008.

Some 59 per cent of public sector organisations rated security as the highest IT priority for this year, followed by virtualisation at 51 per cent.

"Recent high-profile data breaches have pushed security to the top of the public sector IT agenda," said Chris Mayers, chief security architect at Citrix.

"It is imperative that people feel safe in the knowledge that personal information held by government departments is properly protected."

Flexible working is also high on most departments' IT agendas. Around 95 per cent of respondents have a policy in place to allow employees to work away from the office, or have plans to implement such a policy in the near future.

However, only 46 per cent of respondents are satisfied that their organisation has strong enough measures for protecting data on mobile devices, including laptops and smartphones.

Citrix believes that virtualisation, while not a panacea for all the security issues in today's environment, can help solve a number of problems facing public and private organisations.

These include more efficient data centres and centralised data storage, which helps reduce the chance of data leakages.