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By Will Sturgeon, 17 January 2005 12:00

NEWS Technology spend among small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) is set to soar, with the perennial cash-cow of security leading the way in terms of what they will be spending on.

The fact many SMBs are spending on security is indicative of the fact they have been stung in the past - and obviously aren't keen on a repeat.

Around half the SMBs surveyed across Europe for an HP report on the state of the market revealed they were hit by a virus attack over the past year and, unsurprisingly, 37 per cent of them said security is now their number one priority - ahead even of creating a return on investment, which was the answer given by 27 per cent of respondents.

Security issues can often represent a fine line for smaller businesses with success on one side, failure on the other. The relative impact of costly and drawn out downtime can often hit their less robust business models far harder than an outage within one unit or division of a large enterprise.

Terry Scerri, vice president, small and medium business, HP EMEA said: "Security breaches cause significant disruption to businesses and in the case of SMBs, are among critical factors for success."

More than a quarter of SMBs (26 per cent) polled in the UK expect to significantly increase their security spend this year. This figure is far higher than either France (15 per cent) or Germany (four per cent), suggesting security vendors would do well to re-invigorate their UK sales teams.

Simon Perry, vice president of security at CA, said: "The SMB market is a world of its own. In terms of what worries them, they definitely worry about viruses and spam. They may worry about email content and what websites their employees are visiting and many may be starting to worry about the relatively new problem of spyware."

Perry said, in an average sized SMB, such as an accountancy firm "IT support will often be done by whoever was silly enough to indicate they knew something about the PC". Very few, if any, will have dedicated security people.

Perry said many SMBs will rely on the default offerings of service providers, such as a firewall which came with the broadband setup and the anti-spam service which came with the webmail provider or hosting service.