Around 40% of businesses will increase their spending on new IT security technologies in 2010, according to a pair of reports by Forrester Research.
The research found that 42% of enterprises expect to increase IT security spending on new technologies by 5% or more this year, and 37%of small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) expect to do the same.
The survey of nearly 2,200 enterprise and SMB business executives and technology decision-makers in North America and Europe, has found that the greatest spending increases are in the area of network security, with 40% of enterprises and 36% of SMBs expect to spend more in 2010, while data security being the largest budget item for IT organisations.
According to Forrester Research, consumerisation of IT, the proliferation of consumer devices in the workplace, is of utmost concern to IT security professionals. Nearly half of all enterprises (46%) had concerns about smartphones, while 38% of enterprises were concerned about Web 2.0 technologies. More than 80% of businesses, large and small identified managing vulnerabilities and complex threats as a high priority in the coming year.
Jonathan Penn, analyst and vice president at Forrester, said: “As we move out of the recession, we expect to see security investments continue to grow, although the nature of that investment is changing. In general, this follows the broader trend of IT losing centralised control of technology adoption, deployment, and use.
“It’s not just consumer technology like iPods and the use of Facebook or Twitter; it also shows up in the uncontrolled proliferation of SharePoint sites by business groups or in the use of cloud computing services by application developers.”
