Security Spending May Increase In 2009

Research firm Forrester predicts security spending, as a percentage of overall IT budgets, is set to rise this year.According to Tim Wilson's recent Dark Reading story, the drivers for the larger chunk of IT budget will be data protection (but isn't that what much of security is always about?) and identity and access management.

From the story:

"In the data security area, the top technologies that firms plan to adopt or pilot during the next 12 months include data leak prevention (21%), application encryption platforms (19%), and enterprise key management solutions (19%), the enterprise report states."

About these findings is: it's about time. Companies have lagged on encryption adoption for too long. With the ever-growing number of state data breach protection laws, I've no doubt encryption and DLP technologies will gain additional traction throughout 2009.

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Now on to identity management:

"Identity and access management (IAM), long viewed as a technology that was too complex and expensive to do on an enterprise level, will push ahead in 2009, according to Forrester. "In a marked shift from a few years ago (and from lingering perceptions today), security is the primary motivator for identity and access management (IAM) adoption by most firms (52 percent), with less than one-quarter (22 percent) citing regulatory compliance as the primary driver," the enterprise report states.

"While firms are concerned with [IAM] products and implementation being too costly (38%) and too complex (30%), 15% to 21% will pilot or adopt a range of IAM technologies during the next 12 months," the report continues. "Enterprise single sign-on will see the highest absolute adoption, with 21% of firms planning to pilot or adopt, followed by provisioning with 19%." Federation and provisioning will see the most growth relative to their existing market penetration, Forrester says.

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Companies would be better off putting more work into their provisioning efforts, as this is where there is still a tremendous amount of manual waste in most companies. As for single sign-on: these applications are still bulky, expensive, and a long haul to ROI: and would be one of the last initiatives I'd undertake if I were a CIO or CISO this year. There are plenty of folks who would disagree with this, but widespread SSO adoption has been predicted since late 2000 and it still hasn't happened. I doubt 2009 will be any different.

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