Forrester: SMB IT Security Spending to Increase

A new Forrester report released last week says that a large number of SMBs plan to increase their spending on network security. In the report titled "The State of SMB IT Security and Emerging Trends 2009 to 2010," about one third (36 percent) of the surveyed SMBs expect their spending in this area to increase by at least 5 percent. A quarter of them say they will increase spending by 10 percent or more.

The report is based on data from a survey of security decision-makers from more than 2,000 organizations.

Studies have repeatedly concluded that SMBs are seriously lacking in this area, so any attempt to shore up security must surely come as good news. Indeed, the importance of robust security cannot be overstated, especially when search giant Google and a number of large corporations recently have admitted that they were subjected to what appear to be government-sponsored hacking attempts.

Interestingly, the technology that the surveyed companies expressed the most concern over is not cloud computing or even data center virtualization, but the smartphone. I find this to be significant, as it shows a growing awareness of the security dangers lurking behind these increasingly powerful devices.

The report suggested that the concern over the use of smartphones is because "from a security perspective, consumerization represents a greater loss of control oversight of the computing infrastructure, whereas cloud and virtualization merely represent a changing management paradigm."

At the end of the day, the increase in security spending is certainly good, but can hardly be considered significant. Still, additional spending is certainly far better than a nonchalant attitude toward network security.