Are IT Security Budgets Recession-Proof?

Apr 29, 2008 4:15 PM

           

IT security budgets remain stable despite an impending economic recession, according to a survey conducted at the recent RSA Conference in San Francisco by Astaro Corp., a vendor of integrated security appliances. Of the more than 300 conference attendees surveyed, 67 percent said that they do not see their security spending behavior affected by the recession in 2008.

Despite this news, growth in IT spending for this year is relatively conservative compared to previous year.

According to Gartner Research, "small businesses expect to increase their IT spending by approximately 3.25 percent over 2007 spending levels. Midsize businesses expect to increase their IT spend in 2008 year over year by 5.34 percent. While positive, these expected increases are more conservative and below the increases we saw during the past two years."

Jan Hichert, Astaro CEO, explains, "Many administrators are looking to consolidate and simplify their security solutions in order to cut back costs and workload. Astaro helps to bring IT security costs down by merging all necessary features into one easy-to-use, robust security solution, giving businesses the best total cost of ownership and ultimately stretching tight IT security budgets even further."

"Small and medium businesses (SMBs) have not traditionally made the foundational investment in security that large enterprises have," so it's a ripe market to attack, says Adam Hils, an analyst at research firm Gartner.

Companies with 500 or fewer employees often have small in-house tech staffs, if they have one at all, and Gartner advises them to spend a bigger percentage of their tech budget on security than large firms, Hils says. While the larger firms are advised to spend 3 to 6 percent, he says it's 7 to 10 percent for SMBs.

"They're not going to have lower security expectations than enterprises," Hils says. "They just have higher simplicity expectations."

Security sellers such as IBM, Websense, Symantec and McAfee rolled out their first SMB-targeted wares in 2007.

According to Hils, more companies will likely do so this year. Cisco Systems has been working on security appliances for SMBs, more simplified versions of products it sells to large companies. Some 70 percent of SMBs already use Cisco networking products. Like Cisco, Juniper Networks gets a boost in the SMB security market because it already sells other networking gear to that market.

Sales of SMB firewall appliances are about $1 billion to $2 billion a year, Hils says. Gartner forecasts sales to rise 35 to 40 percent in that market from 2007 to 2011.

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