IT Security & Network Security News & Reviews: Security Spending Priorities for 2011 to Include Firewalls, Blocking Tools

State of Security Market

IT security is a $35 billion market today, Forrester says. A combination of factors—including the threat landscape, the rise of new security technologies and changing data-security requirements—are driving growth. It also has led to a rising profile of CIOs—54 percent of enterprise CIOs report to a C-level executive.

Budget Size

Despite the recession, IT security spending largely avoided the declines experienced by other parts of the enterprise budget, Forrester research shows. That growth is expected to continue through 2011.

Spending Priorities

Many respondents feel data-security technologies are an important area of focus. Vulnerability management has also risen in importance, according to the report. Meanwhile, respondents expect spending on application-security and identity-management projects to drop.

Challenges to Security Budgets

While security budgets have grown, there has been an emphasis on tactical and reactive technologies. Many challenges that IT pros face in their budgets—including other priorities in the organization taking precedence—involve a business makeup and priorities, the report said. "To a large degree, a tactical and reactive approach to security is forced upon even the best-intentioned security heads due to the overwhelming range of responsibilities that their programs have accumulated over the years," according to Forrester.

Security Investments

Most security investments in 2011 will reflect the tactical concerns of businesses, Forrester found. This means a focus on reactive security measures such as firewalls and IDS/IPS (intrusion-detection systems/intrusion-protection systems).

Embracing Managed Services

Organizations are hopping aboard the managed-services train, and are also seeking more from their providers than before. Forrester predicts managed-security-services providers that are multifaceted solution providers, such as IBM and Wipro, will establish market dominance.

Security SAAS

E-mail filtering was the vanguard of SAAS (software as a service)-based security. However, there are other security solutions gaining a foothold as well, including vulnerability scanning, distributed denial-of-service protection and identity-management services.