Gartner: Antivirus is biggest security expense

Spending on security software across Europe is expected to top 2.4 billion euros ($3.3 billion) this year, with antivirus software continuing to form the largest slice of the pie.

Antivirus software will account for more than 50 percent of the total security software revenue market in 2007, according to the calculations by analyst Gartner.

Organizations are getting more sophisticated in the way they choose security products, and technical evaluations are now common practice, the analyst firm said. Customers also want to deal with a smaller number of vendors that can supply products that work well together.

Gartner principal research analyst Ruggero Contu said that traditionally, the security software market has been dominated by "best-of-needs" vendors, but the market is now starting to see a gradual consolidation around fewer players.

However, Contu added that security is becoming more complex and difficult for a single vendor to handle. "Customers require products that integrate with their security architecture rather than disconnected-point solutions," he said in a statement.

Steve Ranger of Silicon.com reported from London.

[roger.d.miller]

Is it just me??

Is it just me or has the quality of the reporting on CNET gone downhill in the last six months? More and more articles seem to be unfinished and the depth and breath of the author's knowledge seems to be diminished.

It's as though articles with multiple sources are being replaced with quickie blog entries.

[wbenton]

It's not only you...

I've found less and less interesting articles and when I saw this article from Gartner of all places... (* CHUCKLE *)

Sheesh... looks like they need to get some better writers!

Walt

[tommangone]

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[Fake Donald Trump]

It is a good investment

to keep the Antivirus software updated. European companies cannot afford the downtime on critical systems that have to be taken offline and scrubbed by an IT expert to remove rootkits and other malware and hope that the rest of the network behind the Firewall didn't also get infected because some employee downloaded Bejeweled 7 from some hacker site that contained a dropper trojan horse program that downloads more viruses and uses the network connection to infect more systems behind the firewall.

Just about every 12 year-old kid with an attitude either writes their own trojans, or downloads a trojan kit with scripts in it to create their own with no knowledge of how a trojan works.

Employees should have limited account access, unless they cannot do their job functions without administrator access, and then they need to be monitored and need a good firewall and AV software to protect them from getting infected.

As always back up data to a network drive that is tape backed up daily. Then keep Ghost images of good system OS images in case you need to repair a workstation quickly to the last known good Ghost image.

[Macaresafer]

It's a bad investment.

If you want to make a good investment, use an OS that doesn't require AV software. Instead of spending money to fix the security holes in Windows, Microsoft has found a way to get people to pay for band aids like AV software! It's a heck of a money making racket: Microsoft saves money on quality control, and the AV vendors get rich providing stop gap measures to people foolish enough to buy from Microsoft.