New study from Forrester Research Inc. stated that It companies will spend more and increase their security budgets in 2009 as compare to 2008. The change will result from a shift in security strategy from computer security threat defense to corporate data protection.
SMBs, which Forrester defines as companies with fewer than 1,000 employees, that means 10.1% of their IT spending will go toward IT security in 2009, compared with 9.1% in 2008.
“What was interesting in this survey was how similar the SMBs were to enterprises, in terms of their issues and objectives and even the pressures they are facing in finding people with the right skills,” said Jonathan Penn, vice president, tech industry strategy — security, at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester and author of the report.
Nearly 20% of the respondents plan to pilot or adopt a host intrusion prevention system (HIPS), file-level encryption, full disk/desktop encryption, endpoint control and data leak prevention in the next 12 months. The moves will almost double the use of these security technologies at SMBs.
Indeed, protecting the data assets of the business was the highest priority for both SMBs and enterprise companies, surpassing threats frequently cited in the past, like malware (ranked fifth of 11 security issues) and regulatory compliance (ranked 10th).
The No. 2 concern for both SMBs and enterprises was application security. It is perhaps not surprising that big companies with dedicated security staffs understand that application protection is an important component of managing risk, Penn said. The fact that the multitasking IT staffs at most SMBs not only share this concern but can also communicate it to upper management represents a shift in their approach to managing risk.
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Comment by Eirik Iverson
The Forrester report indicates a greater awareness among SMB IT personnel that their PCs need greater protections. But trialing HIPS products can be difficult. I opined on that a bit over here:
http://www.securitynowblog.com/endpoint_security/hips-security-software-trial-necessary-difficult