Spending To Fend Off Online Attacks To Grow

The Yankee Group survey reports 54 percent of companies plan to boost their security budgets during the next three years, while only 8 percent say they'll be decreasing what they spend to secure their systems. Nearly 40 percent of companies say their security spending will remain about the same.

Mike Paquette, vice president of technology for security vendor Top Layer Networks, says he feels encouraged by the news.

"The anticipated spending is in line with what we hoped. There currently exists a deficit between the security that companies have deployed and the existing threats," he says.

Antivirus, intrusion-detection and -prevention systems, and firewalls will be the only security technologies in which more than half of respondents expect to increase security spending. Fewer than half of all companies will increase spending in other areas, such as access control, authentication and provisioning, personal firewalls, and digital-rights management.

The survey shows that the largest chunk of security spending - 25 percent -will go toward maintaining installed products, while 24 percent of security budgets will go toward new products. Staffing will be No. 3, at 22 percent. Funding for new-product pilots and evaluations and security outsourcing will come next.

The top three spending areas in 2004 will be antivirus, intrusion-detection systems, and firewalls. Fighting for scraps will be Web-application security, access control, storage security, anti-spam, authentication technology, and wireless security.

The survey also found that the average cost to deploy patches to desktops is expensive for larger organizations. According to the survey, the mean cost to patch a desktop is $234.

For more security-related news, see CRN's Security Site.

This story courtesy of InformationWeek.