Month: November 2003

North American IT budgets are expected to increase to $729.2 billion next year, up 1.7 percent from the level anticipated for this year, according to a survey of more than Get Up to Speed on…

Forrester itself says budgets could grow as much as 4 percent, as IT spending catches up with the economy. “More firms are saying they expect their budgets to increase over last year.

More than half the companies surveyed listed risk management initiatives as their top priority for next year.

Companies are also interested in upgrading their PCs next year, with 27 percent of those surveyed saying they expect to spend more–an improvement from 24 percent anticipated for this year.

And the percentage of IT buyers who expect to spend less in 2004 declined to 24 percent, compared with 27 percent for this year.

Software licensing and development, meanwhile, will be a more challenging environment. The percentage of those anticipating a 2004 spending increase in those areas fell to 30 percent, compared with 35 percent for this year.

Although most companies are anticipating upgrades or a major applications deployment next year, any rollouts will likely span a long period of time, resulting in a decline in anticipated applications budgets next year, Pohlmann said.

More info: [url=http://news.com.com/2100-7355-5105143.html?tag=guts_lh_7355]http://news.com.com/2100-7355-5105143.html?tag=guts_lh_7355[/url]

Firewall are seem as an essential part of an overall security strategy. The only other technology or security strategy that was seen to have greater promise was disaster recovery.

“Firewalls are rapidly evolving in their roles, and the boundary between firewalls and other infrastructure elements is becoming blurry,” said Fred Cohen, an information security luminary and an analyst with the Burton Group. For example, special firewalls are needed to screen XML transmissions, which can sail through most firewalls.

No one would argue that a modern company with a network doesn’t need a firewall at the gateway, but there are some differences of opinion over whether personal firewalls are needed.

Cohen does recommend personal firewalls for users who access a network remotely with laptops.

The specialization of firewalls means there will be tradeoffs, Cohen said. There is the tension between the idea of a distributed approach and the idea of a centralized one. “The lack of a clear picture [integrating] intrusion detection, special-purpose filtering devices and other services into infrastructure makes many enterprises hesitant to adopt integrated firewall solutions until the market clarifies,” Cohen said.

More info: [url=http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid14_gci936078,00.html]http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid14_gci936078,00.html[/url]

The comments came during a media round-table session at the Gartner Symposium and IT Expo, which began today in Sydney, Australia.

The director, Rich Mogull, told journalists that despite the incidence of high profile digital attacks, cyber terrorism is a phenomenon that has never occurred.

Even though there were examples of attacks that have physical consequences – they could not be described as terrorist acts, Mogull explained.

Mogull maintains the argument is largely academic – it doesn’t matter who’s attacking an organisation, it should be doing the best it can to protect itself in the first place, whether attacks are coming from criminals or “cyber terrorists”.

Let’s look at protecting ourselves by closing the vulnerabilities we know exist, and protecting ourselves from the attacks that we know exist,” he said.

More info: [url=http://www.silicon.com/management/government/0,39024677,39116842,00.htm?foo=’Cyber%20terrorism’:%20Don’t%20believe%20the%20hype%20says%20Gartner%2011–11]http://www.silicon.com/management/government/0,39024677,39116842,00.htm?foo=’Cyber%20terrorism’:%20Don’t%20believe%20the%20hype%20says%20Gartner%2011–11[/url]