Symantec Corp. released the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ)  findings of its 2009 Global Small and Mid-sized Business (SMB) Security and Storage survey, revealing that 84% of IT spending by SMBs in APJ will increase (57%) or remain the same (27%) this year despite the current economic uncertainty.  System upgrades, automated patch management and data replication ranked as the top three IT investment priorities in APJ this year.  

The survey also revealed that the top three concerns of APJ SMBs are viruses, data breaches, and loss of confidential or proprietary information through USB and other devices. In addition, 52% of SMBs in APJ has previously suffered a security breach and the risk of suffering a recurring security breach is higher in the APJ region than in other regions around the world. However, there is a low adoption of basic security measures in APJ with 56% of SMBs not having an endpoint protection solution and 53% not having a desktop backup and recovery solution.

Findings on storage showed that 70% of APJ SMBs are extremely concerned with backup and recovery of data, followed by disaster recovery planning and strategy (64%), and archiving data and emails (56%).  Yet 53% of SMBs have not deployed desktop backup and recovery solutions, and 45% perform backup on a weekly or less frequent basis.

These gaps in basic levels of security, despite an awareness of the current internal and external threats amongst APJ SMBs, are driving an increase in security breaches, with the most common causes being system breakdowns and hardware failure, human error and improper or out-of -date security solutions. Lack of budget (41%) and employee skills (40%) were cited as the main barriers to securing the SMB environment.