Software holes will mean security-related downtime will triple by 2008, unless IT managers take matters into their hands.

According to analyst house Gartner, downtime linked to security problems will rise from five per cent to 15 per cent of all downtime, due to the influx of mobile working technologies and a growing dependence among businesses on the internet and web services.

The analyst house has a degree of optimism for how future security will pan out. John Pescatore, Gartner VP and research fellow, said in a statement that in the next few years changes to OSes and hardware will help the security effort but in the meantime, IT staff will have to try and use "stopgap approaches to deal with new vulnerabilities associated with unsafe customer, employee and business partner platforms".

By Jo Best at Silicon.

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