Most plan to maintain or increase web security spending

Monday, March 23, 2009

A new survey released by the Security Spending Benchmarks Project found that two-thirds of companies expect their spending on web application security to either stay flat or increase this year.

Conducted by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), the benchmarking report seeks to quantify how resources should be allocated towards network security efforts.

"This project is motivated by the fact that there are few, if any, industry standard benchmarks for executive management to consider when deciding what is a reasonable amount of resources to spend on Web application security in or out of the software development processes," the introduction to the report says.

The survey of 51 companies found that organizations that have suffered a public data breach spend more on security in the development process than those that have not and 38 percent of companies have a third party conduct a security review of outsourced code.

An independent third party security review is conducted at 61 percent of companies before deploying a web application, while 17 percent do not use a thi8rd party review.

A little less than 50 percent of the surveyed organizations have web application firewalls deployed for at least some of their applications.

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