Stijn Bijnens, chief executive at security specialist Ubizen, explains the latest advances and the case for outsourcing.

IT Week: How has the economic slowdown affected firms' spending on IT security?

Stijn Bijnens: The generally bad economic situation is taking its toll, having companies spend less on IT applications as a whole. This obviously had its effects on the security sector, but firms do need to keep up their investments in security. [Analyst company] Gartner has predicted that in 2005 about a fifth of all companies will be confronted with a serious security incident, and that the repair costs will be 50 percent higher than the prevention cost. I would think that the case is made for companies to increase their spending on protection.

What are the key areas that firms should protect?

It is especially important to protect vulnerable servers such as web or email servers, on which the latest security updates are often not installed. The repercussions of unpatched servers were clearly shown by the Slammer worm, which took advantage of an eight-month-old vulnerability in Microsoft SQL Server.

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