What We’re Spending Our IT Security Budgets On

Australian businesses will spend on $1.9 billion on information security in 2014, according to Gartner. The areas where that’s growing fastest? Privacy protection and cloud.

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Australia’s spend is a fraction of the global total of $71.1 billion, but sales are growing faster here than elsewhere — we’re up 13.5 per cent on last year, compared to 7.9 per cent worldwide. One big reason for that switch is the changes to local privacy laws introduced this year, which provide a business incentive for ensuring personal data is properly secured.

The other evident trend — moving to the cloud — is less surprising. By 2015, cloud will account for 10 per cent of IT security rollouts in enterprise, and 30 per cent in small business. One lesson there? Expertise in cloud-based security software is relatively rare, so it’s worth considering as a career path.