After years of either ignoring or neglecting their security infrastructure, small and midsized businesses are now, it would seem, coming to terms with the fact that it's more expensive not to invest the money and staff required to keep hackers, phishers and garden-variety cybercrooks at bay.

According to a Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC) survey of 2,152 executives and IT administrators at companies with between 10 and 499 employees, the majority of SMBs are now making data security their top IT priority compared to just 15 months ago, when the majority admitted they had yet to implement even the most basic data security technologies and policies and more than 33 percent didn't even have basic antivirus software applications installed.

Our sister site, SmallBusinessComputing.com has the full story.