Spending on information security to increase?

A survey by Infosecurity Europe has found that spending on Information security is likely to increase according to 55% of the 1010 respondents they asked and 34% expected their spending to remain the same as last year. Only 8% expect minor reductions of less than 5% of last years spending and 2% expect significant reductions of more than 5%.

This contrasts significantly with overall spending on IT as 36% of respondents expect minor reductions from last years IT Spending and a third expect to see major reductions compared to last years IT Spending. A fifth expect overall IT spending to be higher than last year and 10% expect their overall IT spend to be the same as last year.

“Even though overall IT budgets may be reduced and the economic crisis continues to deepen, spending on information security will continue to grow driven by the increase in security threats and the fact that many organizations are still in catch up mode. IAM projects are still on a catch-up mode, so more work is needed. In addition, new areas call for additional spending. Mobile users and remote access are still poorly protected against very agile threats.” said Eric Domage, Research Manager – Security Products & Services, IDC EMEA Software Group.

Domage continued, “We expect to see an increase in “Frustration Hacking” when people opportunistically attack their own company because they have been fired or frustrated, these first-time-last-time attacks are almost impossible to prevent. They are called first-time-last-time attacks because the people committing them have never done anything wrong before and it is done on their last day in the job. Attacks of this nature are complex to detect, prevent and remedy, for example if someone deletes all the data on servers in a company it can take weeks to correct. Prevention requires security policy, encryption and access control, these are large projects which need to be implemented before a frustration hacking attack takes place and this is one factor that is driving spending on information security.”

He continued. “Our prediction for the Western European Software Information Security market is that it will grow by 7% in 2009 driven by concerns about holes in information security such as Data Leakage Prevention, data integrity attacks and mobile security which are all new areas that many organizations are still getting to grips with.”