As companies rein in IT spending, analysts are predicting less spending
on PCs and mobile handsets, but the recession will not hurt cloud
computing and security products.
These are predictions made by two market research firms this week.
IDC
of Framingham, Mass. Thursday published a report, dubbed IDC
Predictions 2009: An Economic Pressure Cooker Will Accelerate the IT
Industry Transformation. In it, the company predicts “it will
be a grim year for mobile gadgets” but spending on cloud computing
“will accelerate” because companies will be under pressure to cut IT
costs.
Meanwhile, Infonetics of Campbell, Calif. announced
Tuesday its statistics show a four per cent increase in spending on
security products between the second and third quarters of this year.
In its paper, titled Network Security Appliances and Software,
Infonetics said companies are buying security products because of
compliance requirements, to save costs, and because of “explosive
growth” in the number, variety and volume of threats.
Infonetics’
report tracks spending on secure routers, Secure Sockets Layer virtual
private networking (SSL VPN) gateways, firewalls, intrusion prevention
and intrusion detection products.
But some areas are seeing
noticeable declines. For example, revenues for servers sold in volume
dropped seven per cent year over year from the third quarter of 2007 to
the same period in 2008, according to a separate IDC report, also
released this week.
This could be due to more efficient use of
servers through virtualization, but it stands to reason many companies
will have less money to spend during the recession. Though much of the
focus is on hardware, the costs that really add up are for licensing
and administration of software, operating systems and services. If your
company is one of the few that’s expanding, you will probably need to
spend on network equipment and services. The same goes if you’re
relying more in cloud computing.
Budgeting for security can be
tricky. You need to separate what’s actually required from products
that the lawyers say you need to exercise “due diligence.” For example,
anti-spam and “compliance” software tends to fall under the realm of
security, but this raises a few questions. Will your company fail to
operate if the CEO gets five e-mails from entrepreneurs trying to sell
him Viagra? Does your company need to save every single file and
e-mail, even those that send 5 MB PowerPoint presentations that would
not be as critical as financial transactions in the event of an
investigation?
There’s also the question of what you really
need. If customers have less money to spend, will this change if every
sales person has the latest and greatest smart phone on the fastest
network? Probably not. But if you’re company is suffering a loss of
business, cutting back on security in the wrong areas could make a bad
situation worse.
