Indian companies lost about Rs 58.59 lakh in revenues in 2009 due to cyber attacks, security software maker Symantec has said.

In addition to this, Indian enterprises also lost an average of Rs 94.56 lakh in organisation, customer and employee data in 2009, while they lost an average of Rs 84.57 lakh in productivity (factors leading to hampering of work like problem with servers), according to Symantec 2010 State of Enterprise Security Study.

"In today's competitive business scenario, loss of confidential data is a matter of huge concern for any organisation as it directly affects the business as well its reputation and credibility. They need to manage risk proactively, protecting not just the infrastructure that data resides in, but also the information itself," Symantec Director (Systems Engineering) Anand Naik told PTI.

With Gartner predicting that total data center capacity in India would grow at 31 per cent to reach 5.1 million square feet by 2012, data security is a concern for IT administrators.

"Protecting information today is the key to a business' ability to grow and thrive. A large percentage of organisations are deploying data loss prevention and end-point protection in order to overcome data and system loss," he said.

The study found that more than 50 per cent of the enterprises surveyed planned to implement significant changes to their data centers in 2010.

"Server virtualisation, storage resource management, continuous data protection, backup and recovery, and security are the key initiatives expected to be in focus in 2010," it said.

"Organisations need to protect their infrastructure by securing their endpoints, messaging and web environments. In addition, defending critical internal servers and implementing the ability to back up and recover data should be priorities," Naik said.

He also suggested taking a content-aware approach to protecting information as the key to know where sensitive information resides, who has access, and how it is coming in or leaving any organisation.

"By prioritising risks and defining policies that span across all locations, customers can enforce policies through built-in automation and work flow and not only identify threats but remediate incidents as they occur or anticipate them before they happen," he added.