Low levels of awareness and poor integration with other enterprise technology systems are hampering firms' data leak prevention strategies and could be exposing them to risk, according to leading security experts at a recent roundtable.

At the event, held by IT security vendor Symantec, senior executive at Accenture, Stuart Okin, argued that outside the military and governmental sectors, most organisations do not have the right culture in place to implement effective data leak prevention solutions.

"But there is no single panacea, which is why we have to be careful with information leak prevention products," he added. "It's questionable how secure some of them are – some of the algorithms still need to be tested."

William Beer, director of Symantec's security practice, agreed that "the level of awareness about the problem is very low and something we need to address", and added that there is still a lot of immaturity in the market.

He also argued that enterprises often fail to maximise their investments in data loss prevention products because of poor maintenance.

"The frustrating thing is that often they're not properly configured; they might be placed on the wrong part of the network or they're doing only a limited part of what the functionality is," said Beer.

But Okin maintained that concentrating on technology, processes and education alone will not be enough in years to come.

"In three or five or ten years time all of our private data will be on the internet, and organised crime will be looking for the authoritative data," he explained. "Firms need to move from a reactive to a proactive stance – if you can provide a realtime threat assessment and embed it in your security offerings it becomes very powerful."

There was also general agreement at the event that firms need to think about integrating their leak prevention solutions with their IT systems in order to get the most value from them.

Thomas Raschke of analyst Forrester predicted that the leak prevention industry will increasingly be populated by larger technology vendors as they look to expand their offerings to offer integrated solutions.

Network and messaging security, digital rights management and knowledge management vendors will "drive this market in the next couple of years because people want these things integrated", he added.