Survey: Security is by far the top spending priority for CIOs in 2015

A survey of 112 CIOs by US investment firm PiperJaffray has found that security will be the top spending priority in 2015.

The devastating hack on Sony as well as Target’s massive credit card breach that ushered in 2014 and others that followed appear to have left their mark on CIOs. An overwhelming majority of CIOs will be treating security as the top spending priority in 2015, according to a new survey by PiperJaffray.

In all, 75 percent of CIOs expect to increase spending on security in 2015, up from 59 percent in 2014. Security is well ahead of the second priority for CIOs in 2015, mobile, which 61 percent of CIOs are planning to increasing spending on.

PiperJaffray’s survey didn’t ask respondents to detail the scale of their increased security spending, but noted essentially that CIOs were spooked by security breaches in recent months, resulting in an “inflection point” in security spending.

A quarter of the respondents in the survey had annual budgets of at least $50 million, with 85 percent coming from North America, 11 percent from EMEA and four percent from the APAC region.

Tech analyst firm Gartner last year forecasted 8.2 percent year on year growt in worldwide information security spending in 2015 to reach $76.9 billion, with the fastest growing segment being data loss prevention technologies. By contrast, Gartner’s forecast for overall IT spending is 3.9 percent year on year growth in 2015.

It’s the second year in a row that security has come out as the top spending priority in PiperJaffray’s CIO survey, while mobile, which was fourth in 2014, this year pipped storage for second place. The slump in Tablet sales over the past year is also reflected in the survey, dropping from third position in 2014 to ninth in 2015.

The investment firm also produced some interesting results by asking CIOs which were their current preferred security vendor and which vendors they planned to work with in 2015. While Symantec captured 21 percent of responses as the current preferred vendor, FireEye nabbed 25 percent of CIOs on the second question. Additionally, 17 percent were planning on working with Palo Alto Networks.

“These results suggest the next-generation vendors are chipping away at the stronghold legacy vendors still have on the security market,” PiperJaffray noted.

The top area of security spending for 2015 according to the survey will be “network security”, followed by endpoint security.

And while cloud adoption in the enterprise seems to be on the rise, 35 percent of CIOs said security was the main reason they would keep data on premise — a figure that was up from 31 percent in 2014. The second major concern was application performance.

A link to the full report can found at Business Insider.

This article is brought to you by Enex TestLab, content directors for CSO Australia.

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