The continued push into the security sector by IT leaders Cisco Systems and Microsoft is making hay with chief security officers, as a new poll of the executives finds that most will consider the well-known vendors’ products in 2006 as they budget network and applications defense technologies. In its inaugural survey of ranking CSOs at 50 Fortune 1000 companies in the United States, New York-based Citigroup Investment Research found that 32 percent of the IT leaders said they plan to increase their security budgets this year, while 54 percent said they expect to maintain their current level of spending. According to Citigroup, some 64 percent of the CSOs interviewed said they plan to buy applications from security software vendors, while 33 percent said they are planning to purchase security products from companies that specialize primarily in data networking technology. While only 33 percent of the executives interviewed said they prefer to buy from data networking vendors, 44 out of the 50 respondents said they have made at least some security purchases from Cisco.