Gartner: information security spending to grow 8% in 2014
According to a new report from analyst Gartner, worldwide spending on information security will grow 8% in 2014 to reach $71 billion by the end of the year. It predicts a similar growth rate in 2015. The fastest growing segment of the IT security market is data loss prevention (DLP), which will swell by 19% in 2014. The cloud is also becoming a more accepted way of buying security services, making up 10% of total spend by the beginning of 2015. Gartner says that the growth in security spending is being driven strongly by the prevalence of targeted attacks, which “has led to increased awareness among organizations that would have traditionally treated security as an IT function and a cost center.”
Ovum: consumer file sharing applications continue to dominate in the enterprise
Consumer services like Dropbox, Google Drive and Apple iCloud are the go-to choice for knowledge workers looking to share files, says analyst Ovum. Of those employees using file sharing and sync tools at work, 89% were using consumer products, with just 9% satisfied with the offering from the IT department. In addition 29% used three or more different services to get their work done. Furthermore, some 44% of enterprise users still don’t use any file share or sync tools at all and continue to rely on USB sticks and email.
Forrester: Garanti Bank of Turkey tops mobile banking functionality ranking
In Forrester’s global ranking of the mobile banking functionality, Turkey’s Garanti Bank scored highest, followed by Spain’s la Caixa and Poland’s mBank. The survey looked at seven different categories across 32 retail banks worldwide: range of touchpoints, enrollment and login, account information, transactional functionality, service features, cross-channel guidance, and marketing and sales. The average score across all banks was a creditable 61%, with US banks doing particularly well in core services. Most banks fell down in marketing and service features, it said.
ABI Research: Internet of Things will spawn 41 billion connected devices by 2020
The world will be humming with connected devices by 2020 according to new data from ABI Research. The analyst predicts that there will be 40.9 billion active connected devices in 2020, more than double the 16 billion expected by the end of 2014. This explosion of new devices is being driven directly by the Internet of Things, it says. Whereas today smartphones, PCs and hub devices make up 44% of total connected devices, this share will drop to 32% by 2020. This means that “75% of the growth between today and the end of the decade will come from non-hub devices: sensor nodes and accessories.”