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Network security will be the highest priority according to the 2011 IT spending intentions report
Wed, 2/16/11 - 10:04am    View comments

Last month Jon Oltsik, a senior principal analyst for the full-service IT analyst and business strategy firm, Enterprise Strategy Group (he's also the founder of its Information Security and Networking services), revealed some fascinating information within his blog titled:

Big Network Security Investments - And Market Opportunities - Ahead

In his blog, Oltsik released some of the more intriguing results of ESG's 2011 IT Spending Intentions Survey where over half (52%) of the respondents, 611 IT professionals from both mid-market (100-1000 employees) and enterprise organizations (more than 1,000 employees), indicated that their IT spending would increase in 2011, as opposed to 2009, when 43% of respondents reported an increase in IT spending:

So what did Oltsik find as the most intriguing result within the survey?

It was that networking and security professionals both claimed that their organizations would make their most significant investments in network security over the next 12-18 months.

That's right, according to the survey, IT professionals will be making network security their highest priority!

Furthermore, when the IT professionals surveyed were asked which areas of infrastructure management their organizations would make the most significant investments in, the top 2 responses were security management (31%) and network management (29%).

And what might all this data mean?

Well, without an ounce of shyness, Oltsik gave his opinion:

"It's easy to dismiss firewalls, IDS/IPS and SIEM software as mature legacy technologies. The ESG data indicates just the opposite-these venerable safeguards are going through a metamorphosis.

"Why?

"Perhaps data center consolidation and rich-media applications are driving new scaling needs. It may be that the threat landscape demands new types of safeguards. It is possible that existing network security and management tools have simply grown long in the tooth.

"I believe that all of these factors are driving network security upgrades and new requirements."

Finally wrapping-up his blog from an industry perspective, Oltsik provided a list of possible winners by naming the following 8 vendors whose devices happen to be supported for monitoring by security lifecycle management solutions vendor - Tufin:

What's your take, do you agree with the conclusions reached in the 2011 IT spending intentions report?

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