The push to beef up IT security won't abate anytime soon, according to a flurry of research reports. As the graph shows, Infonetics Research analysts project that overall spending on security products in the United States and Canada will soar by 239 percent from last year through mid-decade. Expenditures for security software, public key infrastructure (PKI) products and services, and managed security services will climb from $2.8 billion in 2001 to $9.5 billion in 2005. Researchers at Dataquest, a unit of Gartner, believe that the worldwide security-software market, in which they include firewall technology, will reach $4.3 billion in sales this year, an 18 percent increase over revenues of $3.6 billion in 2001. International Data Corporation analysts anticipate that the US market for managed security services will increase from $720 million in 2000 to $2.2 billion in 2005, a compound annual growth rate of 25.4 percent.
