Spending more on security doesn't necessarily make you more secure, Gartner warned yesterday.

The analyst firm forecasts that information security spending will drop from an average six-to-nine per cent of IT budgets to between four and five per cent as organisations improve security management and efficiency. Victor Wheatman, Gartner security veep, told delegates at the IT Security Summit in London that the most secure organisations spend less than the average and that the lowest spending organisations are the most secure. The businesses can safely reduce the share of security in their overall IT budget to three or four per cent by 2006, he said.

He described Windows as “the biggest beta test in history" and warned warned IT security pros not to expect too much from Microsoft’s vaunted Trustworthy Computing initiative. "Microsoft will try, and there'll be improvement with Longhorn, but it will not solve all your security problems - no matter what the richest man in the world says,” he said. According to Gartner better quality assurance of software is needed before it goes into production. If 50 per cent of vulnerabilities are removed prior to software being put in production then incident response costs would be reduced by 75 per cent, it estimates.

Gartner has identified IT security technologies enterprises will need over the next five years - and other technologies most companies probably won't need. On the enterprise shopping list is host-based intrusion prevention, identity management, 802.1X authentication and gateway spam and AV scanning. Security technologies Gartner reckons most companies can safely do without include personal digital signatures, biometrics, enterprise digital rights management and 500-page security policies. ®

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