Survey Shows Security Budgets on Rise
<strong>Burlington, Mass. — Oct. 18</strong><br />IT security budgets in the SMB market are in strong and healthy state moving into the fourth quarter, and they are creating strong demand for the VAR/reseller community, according to the results of a global market survey conducted by Astaro Corp., a provider of unified threat management (UTM) security appliances.<br /><br />In June, 2,800 Astaro channel partners, resellers and end-users participated in a market-trend survey on topics such as IT security tools, managed services, foremost challenges and planned investments. <br /><br />Survey respondents represented diverse industries including manufacturing, health care, education and financial services.<br /><br />Of those surveyed, 37 percent plan to allocate $50,000 for security tools and services in the next fiscal year, and 13.6 percent of those polled plan to set aside between $50,000 to $100,000 for their security budgets. <br /><br />Fewer than 10 percent plan to spend more than $1 million on network security solutions within the next year. The majority of respondents were companies with fewer than 100 employees.<br /><br />One quarter of respondents claim that their organizations will spend between 7 percent and 10 percent of their total IT budget on security. Thirteen percent plan to spend more than 15 percent of their total IT budget on security.<br /><br />Planned investments for the next fiscal year show that nearly 70 percent will increase budgets to prevent unauthorized access to networks and data.<br /><br />Sixty percent expressed concern in vulnerability assessment, leakage of confidential data and protecting Web applications from worms or hacker attacks (via SQL/command injection) and plan to investment in protection against these threats.<br /><br />Half of the respondents reported desktop security for notebooks and wireless data communications as being priority areas for next year’s investments.<br /><br />“The biggest challenge our customers and resellers are facing over the next five years is the ability to find vulnerabilities in their systems and prevent unauthorized network access,” said Arne Klein, Astaro vice president of marketing and author of the report. “Overall, the state of IT spending on security will continue unabated, with managed security services gaining ground in almost every application.”
