A new survey out today commissioned by PriceWaterhouseCoopers and the Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), indicates that 13 per cent of Britain’s large businesses have faced malicious network penetration by cybercriminals.

This is an interesting observation, not least because the survey took the views of over 1,000 companies, but also because the figure was a marked leap from the 2 per cent reported only two years ago, and could even underestimate the problem, given that many firms do not admit to successful attacks on their IT systems.

Malicious attacks are estimated to cost the UK economy several billion pounds a year. The same survey also revealed that despite falling victim to 94 serious data breaches in the past year, 90 per cent of businesses still let staff take sensitive information off site on USB sticks and in laptops – a disaster waiting to happen with various examples of pub laptop thefts proving the point.

Outsourcing can provide two sides to the coin. Sometimes it can be a benefit to get some standards written up, procedures in place, and relationships with a specialist IT company that understands the value of digital information. On the other hand, sometimes it means that company-to-company hand-offs of information need to take place where previously everything was internal, and that itself can cause issues.