IT contractors may be needed to help companies to modernise their information security processes.

Many companies are still failing to properly ensure the security of their data, due to the fact that their IT managers have failed to move with the changing threat landscape, Gartner researcher Joseph Feiman told Computer Weekly.

This leaves their information security processes outdated and vulnerable to exploitation, Mr Feiman adds.

Instead, he recommends that firms invest in building an all-encompassing approach to data security, which reacts and moves with threats rather than seeing them as isolated incidents.

"Mature enterprise security requires interaction and correlation of different security technologies to increase accuracy and breadth of security detection, remediation and protection," he told the publication.

Scottish ministers were recently told by the Liberal Democrats that they needed to "get a grip" on data security, following the loss of scores of laptops, mobile phones and USB storage devices.