With the world facing new and unprecedented threats you'd have thought that security spending would have been top of the agenda for the past twelve months but according to the vendor and end user communities this simply isn't the case. Security spending has been placed on hold along with the multitude of other IT projects, all equally deemed as essential to the business. The vendors are suffering too, just ask them, look at their results.

The whole security industry has suffered along with the rest of the IT vendors but there may be some light at the end of the tunnel. Assuming that tech spending picks up, IDC reckon that the security market could be one of its prime beneficiaries over the coming years. It argues that the vendor community has been going through a period of reflection, trying to understand budgets, priorities and indeed the security requirements of their business. Having done that though, IDC believes the market is poised to double.

The company believes that security spending is going to grow so much as to inflate the industry's worth from only 6 billion in 2001 to more than 55 billion by 2006. For 2002 this will translate into a market worth an estimated 0 billion and it's going to continue growing apparently. More than 40% of the IT buyers polled by IDC said that security was absolutely top of their priority list for the future. Security was the one area of technology that IT buyers said would benefit from an increased budget in the future too.

A large portion of this will come from projects that have been put on hold, the rest will be from the much needed investment on secure networks. If this world of technology and business is to move forward in the current environment it needs to be secure - and that's going to require a lot of spending, on software, skills, services, strategy. Having left much of the required work for at least six months now, many companies will find they are spending on security assessment solutions too, to ensure that they are filling all of the gaps in their infrastructure.

Disaster recovery and other business continuity solutions will continue to feature highly amongst security spending, even accounting for a slightly above average contribution to the market revenues. But overall, security spending is evenly distributed across business continuity, infrastructure and information security solutions.

Helpful Link:
If this world of technology and business is to move forward in the current environment it needs to be secure - and that's going to require a lot of spending, on software, skills, services, strategy. Finding the best free antivirus software is vital now more than ever.