IT security spending this year will focus on hackers and viruses with managing employee access via VPN and identity management a lesser priority, Yankee Group research has claimed.
A Yankee Group survey released late December 2003 has reported that 54 percent of US companies planned to boost their security budgets in the next three years, while eight percent would decrease what they spend to secure their systems.
Nearly 40 percent of companies said in the survey that their security spending would stay about the same.
Mike Paquette, vice-president of technology for security vendor Top Layer Networks, said the news was encouraging. 'The anticipated spending is in line with what we hoped. There exists a deficit between the security that companies have deployed and the existing threats,' he said.
Anti-virus, intrusion detection and prevention, and firewalls were the only security technologies in which more than half of respondents expected to spend more. Fewer than half of all companies surveyed would spend more in other areas, such as access control, authentication and provisioning, personal firewalls and digital-rights management.
The survey suggested that the largest chunk of security spending -- 25 percent -- would go to maintaining installed products, while 24 percent of security budgets will go toward new products. Staffing would be the third biggest budget chunk at 22 percent, while funding for product pilots, evaluations and security outsourcing would come next.
The top three spending areas in 2004 was expected to be anti-virus, intrusion detection systems and firewalls. Web-application security, access control, storage security, anti-spam, authentication technology and wireless security would be lesser priorities, the report suggested.
The survey also found that the average cost to deploy patches to desktops was US$234 for larger organisations.
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