EMEA security spend to increase

By Alex Kayle, Senior portals journalist

Johannesburg, 25 May 2009

For the next few years, security spend in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region is going to be in the middle figures. This is according to Ian Cochrane, Trend Micro regional marketing manager.

“In our experience of the market, spend in Africa will be higher due to the massive growth in Internet penetration the continent is experiencing,” he notes.

Cochrane will speak at the ITWeb Security Summit, kicking off tomorrow at VodaWorld in Midrand. The summit will also feature hot topics such as cyber crime, data loss prevention, security vulnerabilities, malware and what companies can do to secure their IT systems.

Cochrane says virtualisation and cloud computing are growing trends but these technologies bring security vulnerabilities. “In 1998, we had less than 3 000 Internet threats, and last year we had seven million. The escalation is exponential and we have to look at ways in which we can minimise the endpoint and put a lot of the information up either in the cloud or in their servers or the data centre.”

Managing complexity

Cochrane says that according to an InformationWeek analytics strategic security study, 62% of IT managers say their top headache is managing the complexity in security.

“The Internet is by far the greatest source of threats and malware and that's where the growth is coming from. It's now malicious gangs looking for financial gain. That's where the market is now. We are seeing the majority of organised crime coming from China and Eastern Europe.”

He adds that another growing trend is data loss prevention, a requirement from financial controllers who don't want financial information getting leaked into the market. He says there will be growth in data loss prevention spend, particularly in the emerging market which is experiencing a shortage of skills.