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Spyware planning off the mark

Spyware hasn't been showing up quite as heavily in our monthly IT Priorities survey as WatchGuard found in their recent study. Looking back over the last 16 months of our data, we see only a slight uptick in current spyware projects over the past few months, despite the fact that IT managers didn't focus specifically on spyware when laying their 12-month security plans.
Written by Natalie Gagliordi, Contributor

Spyware hasn't been showing up quite as heavily in our monthly IT Priorities survey as WatchGuard found in their recent study. Looking back over the last 16 months of our data, we see only a slight uptick in current spyware projects over the past few months, despite the fact that IT managers didn't focus specifically on spyware when laying their 12-month security plans.

When we examinedthe data on thetechnologies that will be most important 18-24 months down the road, we found that over the past 6 months, IT managers have begun to identify spyware as a top security concern. This issurprising since the data we collect on these longer-term technology issues have historically consisted of more general responses. For example, managers may say that security will be a major part of their plans 24 months out, but they infrequently mention specific firewall or virus defense projects.

But since July 2004, there has been a notable shift--spyware has been specifically named as a security issue that will have a major impact onbusiness and IT operations. With the apparent 'spyware' gap among our data on 12-month security plans, spyware has clearly leapt from being a longer-term concern to being a problem that has to be dealt with today--leaving no time forplanning.

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