Survey Says Security Chiefs Expect Boost in Cloud Spending

• By Matt Holden
• Nov 05, 2014

The shifting of data center resources to public and private cloud environments may be forcing organizations to shift IT spending to initiatives that support data protection, monitoring and managed security services, according to a survey conducted by IBM.

Nearly 150 security chiefs responded to the survey, which came to the conclusion that security budgets are expected to increase over the next three to five years as the elasticity of the perimeter grows increasingly difficult for security professionals to secure.

The budget increases could be a boon for managed security services providers and the flood of emerging vendors selling security analytics, automated incident response and advanced threat detection capabilities, said Kris Lovejoy, general manager of IBM's security services division. New technology paradigms are going to require a skilled partner ecosystem of systems integrators, consultants and regional managed services providers with strong security practices, said Lovejoy, also a senior IT architect and systems engineer at IBM.

“Customers are seeing through all these breaches that their data is vulnerable, especially in the cloud where they often don’t have as much control over data and processes,” said David Sockol, president and CEO of security consulting firm Emagined Security. “They’re starting to put protections in place around their cloud assets.”