IT Security Spending Trends
Posted by Victor Barris on Fri, May 15, 2009
A colleague recently forwarded me an article referencing ComTIA’s 7th annual “Trend in Information Security” survey. I’ve always been a bit of a skeptic when it comes to some of these surveys, but with the current state of IT spending and how Information Security is impacted I needed to look into this a bit further.
Being in IT and Information Security now for close to twenty years it’s safe to say I’ve been through a couple of cycles where IT spending has been impacted based on challenging economic times.
Continuing to keep a pulse reading on the market and IT spending we’ve had our share of customers responding with the typical “Budgets are on hold” statements and “”We’ve just laid off 20% of our IT staff.” No question IT spending has suffered, but I can attest to CompTIA’s survey on the fact we’ve experienced IT Security spending sustain itself and even increase in some areas. Vendors we partner with who are focused on security solutions addressing regulatory requirements and operations efficiencies have had record setting quarters particularly Q4 of ’08 and most recently Q1 in ’09.
One of the key areas we’ve experienced increased activity in IT Security spending has been with on-boarding and off-boarding of employee accounts resulting from either downsizing or mergers and acquisitions. These are Identity Management specific tasks and the focus and attention in these areas are required to address regulatory requirements, operations efficiencies and mitigating any potential security risks. Organizations have worked diligently addressing these tasks manually, but when companies are now operating with a reduced staff members cutting corners to achieve these critical tasks should not be an option. There are short term and long term gains in automating Account Provisioning and Deprovisioning both from a cost saving and operational efficiencies.