According to a poll conducted by Astaro Internet Security, it seems as though security budgets are likely not to get hit as hard by the current economic downturn as I would have expected.

Of the over 300 conference attendees surveyed, 67% said that they do not see their security spending behavior affected by the recession in 2008.

This is somewhat good news, and it puts a tiny ray of hope into my usually dreary view of the general corporate commitment to security.

I’ve lamented on several occasions the fact that security is seen as more of a “because we have to” expenditure rather than “because it’s a good idea”. My first thought would be that, when times get lean for a company, security would be one of the first things on the chopping block for budget cuts. This is obviously not a great situation, as if I were correct, then it’s not only my business clients that would be doing this, it would also be all of the companies handling my personal information as well.

The 67% figure quoted in the blurb seems too good to be true, though. On closer inspection, the poll considered 300 people who were attending the RSA conference. You have to wonder if their responses didn’t contain at least a little wishful thinking, as the RSA conference is generally populated with a lot of security-minded people that don’t want to see their budgets cut.

So, even if 67% is an optimistic number, think about how many companies deal with your personal information. Four large businesses that come to mind for me are my health care provider, bank, credit card company and mortgage holder. Assuming these industries are all covered by the 67% figure, there’s an 80% [1.0 – (2/3)^4] chance that at least one of them will be cutting their security budget during a recession.

I’m already not confident with the state of IT security. With a recession looming, things are fixing to get even worse. This is not good.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 5:27 pm by Walt Turnes and is filed under privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.