Organizations in all industries and of all sizes require some form of IT security technology. In analyzing adoption and investment trends in IT security technology, there is a problem: IT security is not just one technology. It includes a wide variety of technologies, from basic security tools such as firewalls and spam filtering to more advanced capabilities such as incident detection.
As seen in Figure 1 from our full report, IT Security Technology Adoption and Customer Experience, the adoption, investment, and satisfaction rates are high. However, the ROI success rate and the TCO success rate for security technology are low compared with other technologies in the study. In other words, despite the threat environment and the high adoption rate, companies are finding difficulty keeping security investments within budget, and the ROI ROI is murky at best.
Nevertheless, there is value in understanding the focus for new investments in IT security and how it may change from year to year. With threats on the rise, the motivation for new investments in IT security is strong. When the mandate is to counter threats to the organization, protect corporate intellectual property, and safeguard personal information, direct economic benefits such as cost savings or increased revenue may not be the main concern.
“For companies, disregarding IT security is like playing Russian roulette,” said Asif Cassim, principal analyst for Avasant Research, based in Los Angeles. “While ROI calculations might struggle to quantify the benefits, the potential consequences of a breach are too high to ignore.”
We define security technology as any technology intended to protect the organization against security threats, detect them, or respond to them. This would include a broad range of technologies from simple firewalls and malware protection to AI and ML-based threat detection. Because there is such a variety of technologies, our survey does not attempt to cover an exhaustive list, but rather a representative sample. The list will change from year to year.
Our full report examines adoption trends for IT security technology of all types, from basic capabilities, such as firewalls and spam filtering, to more advanced technologies, such as incident detection, and everything in between. We analyze the adoption rate, investment rate, and economic experience for security technology overall. We also evaluate the cost side of the equation by measuring the percentage of organizations that exceed budgets for TCO. We conclude with recommendations for ensuring the success of IT security technology investments.
This Research Byte is a brief overview of our report on this subject, IT Security Technology Adoption and Customer Experience. The full report is available at no charge for subscribers, or it may be purchased by non-clients directly from our website (click for pricing).