The Enterprise IT Security Buyer Profile: 2009

Security is one of the more resilient areas of IT spending in this global recession. IT security spending has been steadily increasing when measured as a percentage of the overall IT operating budget — representing a greater slice of the IT budget pie. Security spending is not universally distributed across the market, but finding the enterprises that are spending more on security than others is not as straightforward as looking at company size, vertical, or geography. Instead, we found that the security high spenders are those enterprises that have aggressively embraced managed security services, run lean security shops from a staffing perspective, and are also further along the evolutionary path to data-centric security. Similarly, high spenders' plans for future technology adoption also differ from enterprises spending less of their IT budgets on security, most markedly in the areas of host intrusion prevention systems, network access control, and identity management.