Firms in Britain and the US have different reasons for investing in IT security.
A new poll has demonstrated the different motivations firms have when it comes to making investments in IT security.
The Ponemon Institute questioned a number of organisations in both the UK and the US to discover how regulation, fear of data security breaches and concerns over reputation influence spending.
It was found that in Britain, 54 per cent of business owners cited compliance as their biggest driver for investment, followed by a sense of responsibility in terms of data protection (45 per cent).
On the contrary, 63 per cent of their US counterparts said a need to respond to breaches that had already happened was behind their desire to improve IT infrastructure.
Indeed, 30 per cent of firms in America said they typically experience more than three incidents of this kind in a year, while only 19 per cent in the UK could say the same.
When asked about their biggest barriers to security, UK organisations were most likely to name complex regulatory requirements, perhaps including red tape from the government.
However, despite their different motivations, there was not too much difference in terms of the actual proportion of budget spent on IT security.
British firms dedicated 13 per cent of their technology budget to this issue, while the corresponding figure for the US was 15 per cent.
Low cost, easy deployment and reasonable running costs were also cited by businesses in both countries as especially important when it comes to qualities sought from this new infrastructure.
"These findings seem to suggest that the UK organisations take a generally more proactive approach to data security than their US counterparts," said Dmitry Shesterin from software firm Faronics.
Meanwhile, a recent poll carried out by Computer Weekly and TechTarget found that 40 per cent of the organisations it questioned in the UK and Europe plan to increase their security budgets in 2013.