Survey predicts possible dip in IT security investment
The survey, covering over 350 attendees of the Interop Las Vegas conference (April 28-May 2), indicated that a 2008 recession will effect IT spending for 52 percent of participants. This represented an increase of nearly 20 percentage points from Astaro’s last survey at the RSA Conference in San Francisco just three weeks earlier, in which only 33 percent of respondents anticipated a recession impacting IT spending.
According to Astaro pollsters, possible reasons for the discrepancy between the survey results from each event range from the event focus, attendee demographics and changes in IT spending concerns due to continued media coverage of an impending recession.
Nevertheless, the results are in line with recent findings by other market research firms. An analyst at Gartner Research, for example, reported that while their polls show "no evidence of widespread IT budget cuts," enterprise buyers of IT products and services, including security solutions, are now "more cautious."
"It is still possible that a deepening economic slowdown could result in aggressive steps to reduce or even freeze IT budgets," the Gartner analyst said.
However, IT security spending has remained strong so far, largely because of federal legislative mandates (including HSPD-12, FIPS, and HPPA), as well as the increasing rates of cyber attacks impacting government and corporate entities.
"Security threats continue to increase by Malthusian proportions, requiring additional security functions to stave off attacks," says Astaro CEO & cofounder Jan Hichert. "This game of catch up is increasingly strained when budgets are tight, which makes finding a solution that continuously adds new layers of protection all the more important."
The solution, Hichert suggested, may lie in consolidating and simplifying security opertations, to realize greater economies of scale while still delivering necessary levels of IT security.
Industry sources conclude that recession fears, which have prompted belt tightening in other areas of corporate and government expenditure, could merely slow the rate of increase of IT security spending.
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