CISO spending priorities revealed

According to a GDS International survey of more than 100 leading European information security professionals, investment priorities are changing.

Spending to support business growth is at an all-time high (22% of 2013 budgets, up 5% on 2012 figures). Mandatory spend to meet regulatory and legal requirements has finally dropped (19% of 2013 budgets, down 7% on 2011 figures).

Resource is not all going towards a brighter tomorrow. Investments to maintain and run existing systems and processes are still the lion’s share, and have grown by 6% since 2011 (41% of 2013 budgets, up from 35% in 2011).

As to where the money is going, respondents said five areas were “priority one or two’ (where one is most important and five is least important). The five areas are: cloud security, data security, document security, social media security, mobile security.

Notable changes occur in spending priorities between 0-12 months (FY 2013) and 12-24 (FY 2014) months on data security, document security and social media security.

54% of respondents indicated spending on data security would be high priority in 2014 (up from 38% in 2013). 38% of respondents indicated spending on document security would be high priority in 2014 (more than double the 15% in 2013). 23% of respondents indicated spending on social media security would be high priority in 2014 (more than triple the 8% in 2013).