Are the data breach headlines failing to yield sales?

By Doug Woodburn

The recent avalanche of high-profile data breaches appears to have had little impact on IT security spending, if Infonetics' latest figures are anything to go by.

According to the market watcher, the global network security market fell by nine per cent between Q1 and Q4 and rose just two per cent annually, with Juniper and Check Point both suffering double-digit drops.

The content security market was also pretty flat.

Infonetics claimed in its Q1 summary that awareness of threats has reached an all-time high in the wake of the Sony data breach and attacks on security vendors such as RSA and Barracuda.

But the hard numbers suggest this increased awareness may not be translating into sales.

Paul Spencer, who is a director at Axial Systems - one of the UK's largest independent security VARs - summed up the mood on the ground when I got his reaction.

"There is a feeling among corporate and public sector organisations that just because it has happened to someone else, it doesn't mean it will happen to them," Spencer said. "The Sony attack was highly targeted and I don't think many IT security managers can see a direct link between what happened to Sony and their own business."

In the UK specifically, several big security vendors are known to have missed their Q1 numbers by a country mile.

Spencer said: "We have seen the biggest cuts in public sector spending for a long time and that's already filtered through to the market. We normally see March as the second-biggest month because government departments run their budgets from April to March. They have to spend it or lose it but this didn't happen this year."