Source: PricewaterhouseCoopers
Author name: PwC advisory services

Published: 10/22/2009

Summary:
The 2010 Global State of Information Security survey asked global executives for their insight on information technology security spending in the face of the current economic downturn.

For many years, information technology — and, by extension, information security — was among the most likely cost centers to encounter cutbacks in funding when companies fell upon difficult economic times.

Why?

One reason — a lingering one, unfortunately — is that business leaders responsible for controlling “the purse strings” haven’t always found it easy to link multi-year investments in security with concrete, tangible, strategy-aligned business outcomes.

A second reason, among many others, is that it’s often seductively tempting for corporate decision-makers — executives under pressure to spread less funding across the same number of priorities — to find false comfort in applying cutbacks equally and indiscriminately across functions and business units until economic strength returns.

So it stands to reason — in the middle of the most significant economic downturn in decades — that the information security function might well be subject to the same waves of layoffs, project cancellations, and budget cuts that are affecting nearly every other corporate function and many different cost centers in companies, industries and regions across the world.

Is that true? To find out, we asked more than 7,200 CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, CISOs, CSOs and other executives responsible for their organization's IT and security investments in 130 countries.

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