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Hot on the heels of Forrester Research’s recent prediction that enterprise businesses will increase security spending from 11.7 percent to 12.6 percent of their overall IT budgets during 2009, gateway filtering specialists Finjan have published results of a survey that highlights even more optimistic growth estimates.
While some might point out that Finjan has every reason in the world to tout such self-serving results, the company said that its anonymous online survey of 200 IT and security professionals worldwide found that respondents expected their security budgets to increase by 12.6 percent. Yes, that’s meant to be the same figure in both cases, but obviously Finjan’s forecast is substantially larger than Forrester’s.
As in the case of Forrester, Finjan found that many of its respondents (34 percent) expect to lower their 2009 IT budgets or leave them alone (38 percent), while a smaller number (28 percent) expect to spend more on technology in the coming year.
Despite those trends, some 34 percent said that they expect to spend more on security in 2009, with another 23 percent indicating that they expect their security budget to stay at the same level as during 2008. Among respondents who intend to increase their security spending, many of those organizations represented the financial services and government segments, Finjan reported.
Even with the promising numbers for IT security vendors, Finjan experts conceded that economic forces are putting more pressure on the entire industry.
“During an economic downturn it is to be expected that all budgets come under scrutiny. Organizations are trying to get the most out of their spending and reduce the TCO of their IT investments – efficiency being the name of the game,” Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CTO at Finjan, said in a report summary. “While 2008 saw IT security departments facing new challenges in protecting valuable business data against an ever-increasing wave of cybercrime attacks, 2009 is adding a further economic challenge to the mix.”
Matt Hines has been following the IT industry for over a decade as a reporter and blogger, and has been specifically focused on the security space since 2003, including a previous stint writing for eWeek and contributing to the Security Watch blog. Hines is currently employed as marketing communications manager at Core Security Technologies, a Boston-based maker of security testing software. The views expressed herein do not necessarily represent the views of Core Security, and neither the company, nor its products and services will be actively discussed in the blog. Please send news, research or tips to SecurityWatchBlog@gmail.com.