A new report by analyst firm Infonetics says spending on security hardware and appliances — such as unified threat management (UTM), intrusion detection/prevention systems and SSL VPN devices — dropped 16 percent in the first quarter of 2009. The reason: businesses cut or delayed spending on IT systems, which led to cascading declines in security spending.
While drop is significant, analyst anticipate security appliance spending will rebound before the end fo the year to two-thirds of 2008 levels.