Prepping them to ward off cybercrime and respond to the latest regulatory mandates will be critical.
Cybercrime and the growth of government compliance requirements can be lumped together as the blob that ate tech spending. Companies are now spending valuable time and millions of dollars defending and complying on a daily basis.
For treasury, this means taking the extra time to help make sure treasury management systems are secure and reporting the right information to now legally responsible chief financial officers. Companies appear to be doing just that: tech spending is supposed to rise in 2010 and much of it could go toward protecting treasury systems.
According to one study almost half of all global businesses view IT security as their top priority. And in late February, Symantec released survey results showing that 75 percent of organizations worldwide have been the victim of a cybercrime, which has led to businesses losing an average of $2 million a year.
As for government regulation, business is booming for governance, compliance and risk (GRC) software and systems. One company, Palo Alto’s MetricStream, announced in February that it saw a 75 percent increase in sales in 2009 versus 2008. Meanwhile, complying with FAS 133 and other proposed derivatives regulations has sparked a boom in valuation services, both as an outsourced solution and via software as service models (SaaS).
Connecting all these dots will require diligence from sales to treasury to audit. And while some look askance at creating an enterprise risk management program, with all of today’s moving parts, some sort of plan is necessary to help monitor IT vulnerabilities.