Security budgets on the rise 23 October, 2007 By Vanessa Ho

Of the 800 Astaro channel partners, resellers and end users participated in the study and of those surveyed, 37 per cent plan to allocate $50,000 (U.S.) for security tools and services in the next fiscal year, while 13.6 per cent of those polled plan to set aside between $50,000 and $100,000 for their security budgets. Less than 10 per cent plan to spend more than $1 million on network security solutions within the next year. The majority of respondents were companies with less than 100 employees.

One quarter of respondents claim that their organizations will spend between seven and 10 per cent of their total IT budget on security. And 13 per cent plan to spend more than 15 per cent of their total IT budget on security.

""Internet threats are increasing exponentially and with the increased threats and the new types of threats emerging on the Internet, companies now have to add different layers of protection [to cover all the threats],"" said Palen Schwab, director of corporate communication with Astaro Corp.

He added that while in the past a firewall would suffice to protect a company's corporate network, companies now have to make sure they have intrusion prevention and detection, spyware protection, virus scanning, the ability to encrypt e-mail and can provide VPN for road warriors. ""The need to have security in place is now a standard.""

The channel can play an important role to help IT departments with their increased spending in security, said Schwab.

He explained that the more functionality that is added to security appliances to help protect companies from the increasing number of threats, the more complicated these devices get and the more time intensive they are to maintain, update and configure. Schwab said that a lot of companies, especially SMBs, look to the channel to offer that first level of support. ""This creates a great opportunity for the channel because people are increasing their spending on security devices and they are approaching resellers & and when [customers] do engage with a specific reseller they are also getting the extra income for setting up, configuring and maintaining these devices and receiving the margins on each appliance.""

In terms of where IT departments are spending their money, the survey indicated that 60 per cent expressed concern in vulnerability assessment, leakage of confidential data and protecting web applications from worms or hacker attacks (via SQL/command injection) and plan to invest in protecting against these threats. As well, companies are investing on beefing up its firewalls and VPNs to help with compliance issues. Additionally, half of the respondents reported desktop security for notebooks and wireless data communications as being priority areas for next year's investments.

Other areas where companies are investing include spam protection. Schwab said that this remains top of mind because everyone in the company is affected by spam and it hurts productivity levels in a company, which is one of the main reasons why people still spend money on spam protection.