Information security pros are not planning a slowdown in spending with 37 percent saying they plan to increase spending in 2012 and 16 percent planning a decrease. Thirty-nine percent are spending more in 2011 versus 2010, and only 15 percent are spending less. This shows the resiliency of the market in challenging economic times.

“Information Security spending is very solid in 2011, and looks to remain that way for 2012," said newly appointed Research Director Daniel Kennedy. "It is not difficult to see why, as significant data breaches in the last few years have never been far from the front page. In addition, environmental complexity continues to increase, including the effects of virtualization and cloud implementations, and consumer IT starts to drive enterprise IT requirements, especially in the mobile computing space."

In the one on one interviews conducted for its bi-annual security report, decision makers at Global 2000 companies said compliance, mobile devices and preventing data loss were the drivers for spending increases. Data leakage prevention (DLP) and application-aware firewalls are products on the move. DLP resides in the top spot of TheInfoPro’s proprietary Information Security Technology Heat Index, which gauges immediacy of planned implementation for 40 technologies, as the G2000 look to protect custodial and intellectual property data from leaking out of their environment. The traditional antivirus vendors, Symantec and Intel’s McAfee, look to benefit with rollouts of both endpoint and network DLP on tap.

Application-aware firewalls make a nice jump in the Heat Index, with Palo Alto and Check Point benefiting from the 28% of in-plan implementations. Palo Alto will be a vendor to watch as it is beginning to replace some of the major incumbent providers with its application-visibility-based approach.

About the study

The Information Security study is completed biannually and is based on 150 hour-long interviews with information security decision-makers at large enterprises in North America. This most recent study had a particular focus on the impact of virtualization, cloud and mobile devices on an organization’s security efforts. A sampling of vendors covered in the Vendor Performance and Technology Roadmap components of the study include: Cisco, Check Point, Juniper Networks, Rapid7, WhiteHat Security, Websense, Sourcefire, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Oracle, Dell, EMC, Microsoft, Blue Coat, Trend Micro, Sophos, HP and FireEye.