Security Threats Rise -- And So Do Security Budgets

Is your security budget increasing? Most small and midsized businesses are growing theirs.A survey by security firm Astaro showed that small and midsized business (most with fewer than 100 employees) are raising security spending for Q4, and will continue to spend more on into next year.

Spending is going up both in real dollars, and in security-as--percentage-of-IT, with about half of the companies planning to commit $50,000 to $100,000 to IT security over the next year. A quarter of the companies are committing up to ten percent of total IT dollars to security; a smaller number are moving toward 15 percent security expenditures.

What's prompting the upped spending? About what you'd expect -- concerns about intrusions and unauthorized access, as well as new expenditures to cover the wider use of wireless and mobile devices.

One hopeful note: 60 percent of the respondents were devoting at least some of the spending to ongoing vulnerability assessment and testing -- exactly the sort of aggressive approach to looking at the network as well as the beasties trying to compromise it that is essential to effective security practices.

So: how do you -- and your budget -- fit into this picture?