Can You Cut Information Security in Hard Times and Survive
The Future of Information Security: 2008 and Beyond

Those questions and many more will be in the spotlight at the upcoming Information Security Summit in Washington, D.C. later this month where Gartner analysts share their views on what enterprises want and vendors can deliver in a world fraught with hackers on one side and regulatory pressures on the other.

Plain and simple, "what's driving customers is data security, in terms of infrastructure protection and compliance," says Adam Hils, the research analyst who will present Gartner's security-market forecast at the conference.

Some Gartner research shows IT security customers are torn by whether to stick with one vendor or go with standalone/best of breed products when it comes to basic buying strategies. Gartner advocates "best of breed — as long as it works with what you have," Hils says.

IT security customers are inclined as never before to a one-vendor strategy — it may be because of budget pressures since there's the perception that this may be cost-savings — but Gartner's advice is to keep the focus on best-of-breed, particularly when a major upgrade is envisioned and new technologies are on the horizon.

A good example is "the next-generation firewall, which combines the network firewall and intrusion-prevention system," Hils says. Vendors in this arena vary widely in terms of their equipment, although most of them aren't yet doing it all that well — though Hils said Juniper seems to be in the forefront for now.

According to Gartner, some of the most exciting areas today are managed services, or security as a service, where customers expect vendors to undertake full-time management responsibilities, either through support of dedicated customer equipment or by delivering cloud-based services.

While e-mail antispam and security filtering is becoming widely adopted, another area, security information and event management (SIEM), which involves complex aggregation and analysis of log data from many data sources, is also gaining uptake from customers, Hils says.

Large firms, including IBM and Symantec, offer managed SIEM services, but several smaller security firms, including SecureWorks, are providers, too. LogLogic is also one whose technology is often used by other providers.

While advanced SIEM equipment is still seen as a big-ticket item afforded mainly by large enterprises, increasingly there are options, like TriGeo, aimed at the small-to-midsized business market, Hils says. The wider SIEM adoption is being driven by compliance pressures, such as the Payment Card Industry (PCI) data-security standards, for log management, he notes.