US security budgets expected to rise

Despite a shaky economy, nearly half of surveyed IT professionals in North America saw increased security budgets this year and expect the growth to continue into the next.

TheInfoPro Information Security Study, showed that 45 percent of respondents increased their budget for security projects and personnel between 2011 and 2012. Findings were based on in-depth interviews conducted with 200 IT professionals, primarily in North America.

On average, respondents said budgets for security initiatives and programs increased from US$1 million to US$1.5 million over the past year. Forty-seven percent of those polled expected their budget to increase again in 2013, with only eight percent predicting a decline.

Daniel Kennedy, research director for networking and information security at 451 Research, the New York-based company that runs TheInfoPro service, told SCMagazine.com on Thursday that mobile device management is among the top projects professionals planned to allocate their funds toward next year.

“That area is really up for grabs,” Kennedy said. “It's almost all around bring-your-own-device, and people are really coming to grips with that. Within the next six months, 20 percent of the respondents have new mobile device management enterprises underway.”

Other security projects expected to command a top priority in spending next year are endpoint and network data leakage prevention initiatives and application-aware firewall implementations.

This article originally appeared at scmagazineus.com