At our New York Metro Information Security Forum, the outlook for security spend appeared to have worsened since our March Washington DC Forum. This is not a good sign for the security professional as "doing more with less" has become the norm for 2009 and could carry into next year as well if the data is indicative of an upcoming trend.
March 2009
May 2009
We haven’t made much noise about our findings as we’ve only recently been taking the pulse of the IANS community and the sample size is just approaching significant enough to draw some conclusions. We are also looking to our upcoming Lone Star Forum to add both size and geographic-indicative data. For example, we noticed New Yorkers were far more pessimistic than Washington DC respondents, which we think is a combination of the macro economy remaining weak and hurting budget planning discussions. New York also holds far more financial institutions than DC, and DC of course has far more government-related agencies. It would appear that the gap between the folks who need the money and those who have the money is revealing itself in more ways than one. So while the data points are indeed telling, making any definitive total market calls from these different market samplings seemed premature in our view.
However, we noticed another survey was just released which adds more credence to our earlier findings. Barron’s reported that “A Gartner survey of 900 CIOs, taken from March 1 to April 30, found the group on average sees a 4.7% decline in spending this year, worse than the 0.16% decline expected in a previous Gartner CIO survey, taken from September to December 2008.”
The confirmation is interesting: Gartner saw a 4.7% decline in the March to April period while our March Forum hinted at a similar direction – 3% expected down 5-10% while 13% expected down over 13%; the dominant result was 71% flat budgets. But the New York Forum was significantly less encouraging with over half of the respondents (55%) looking at budgets down anywhere from less than 5% to over 10%. But the most interesting data point for us is the next year.
2010 No Better?
The New York Forum data is definitely concerning: only 9% of respondents expect any increase in budgets and a third expect flat. So yet again, the dominant portion of the group surveyed (58%) expect a lower budget. It is the compounded year over year decline that makes us pause. We will post the Dallas results in the coming weeks to help add more color to the potential outlook picture.
Keeping the Faith
Certainly the security professional does not want to hear that budgets are going down. The unrelenting pressure of external attacks is now low and slow, internal threats are being enhanced by never-ending new technology adoptions, and the never-happy business user’s demands never cease – these issues are challenging enough with current investment levels. We would suggest reviewing our Buyer Strategies to help maximize these ever-scarcer dollars. The highlights of these strategies? Lowering maintenance contracts, finding "partners" over "vendors", and utilizing lower-TCO solutions to maximize efficiency.
Reach out to us if you want to hear more - that's why we're here.
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