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Cisco's study predicts an increase in security spending in 2008
By siliconindia
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Thursday, 13 March 2008, 02:07 IST
Mumbai: Cisco has announced the second and final set of findings from annual research on remote workers' impact on corporate security, revealing that three of every five IT decision makers plan to increase security spending within the next year.
Commissioned by Cisco and conducted by InsightExpress, a third-party market research firm, the study surveys more than 2,000 remote workers and IT professionals across 10 countries, which include the U.S., UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, China, India, Australia, and Brazil.
While the first set of results, released last month, center on remote workers' security perceptions, online behavior, and their rationale for risky actions, this announcement focuses on the implications that employees have on IT, and particularly the resulting financial burden. Sixty-two percent of IT respondents reported that they will increase security-related spending in 2008, and of those, more than half (37 percent) said their increased security investments will rise by more than 10 percent as compared to their previous years' budgets.
The findings highlight the fact that security spending can increase based on financial losses that businesses suffer from attacks on corporate networks and employees. Of the 10 countries in the study, China, India, and Brazil feature the highest number of IT decision makers who are planning to increase spending.
According to John N. Stewart, Cisco's chief security officer, large populations of network-dependent employees in China, India, and Brazil were not overwhelmed by Code Red, NIMDA, and the other notorious malware attacks as pervasively as in Internet-dependent, consumer-based economies like the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Japan. However, today they represent three of the world's fastest growing economies, and their dependence on the Internet and corporate networks is rising rapidly.
Although China, India, and Brazil feature the highest projected rates of spending, the trend is not relegated to emerging economies. More than half of the IT respondents in eight of the 10 countries are planning to increase security spending this year.
Security is a real-life business requirement, and Stewart affirms that the research provides global intelligence for IT organizations to take a practical approach to protecting their companies and employees, especially as they become more distributed. Just as IT budgets are a necessity, so too is security spending. What's important, he said, is to understand the delineation between what's considered "acceptable" and "unacceptable" spending. The goal is to prevent spending on reactive security "firefighting".
