$30 billion to be spent on US network security

The front page of the InformationWeek website is all about the breaking story about Microsoft's bid to buy Yahoo!  That's interesting, but it wasn't the first story that caught my eye this morning, so I'll talk about this other little article that I read about this morning and let everyone else spin in circles about Microsoft and Yahoo!

According to George Hulme, who writes the InformationWeek Security Blog, the U.S. Federal government is planning on spending $6 billion on network security next year and up to $30 billion over the next seven years.  I'll have to admit, I have a hard time wrapping my head around just how much $30 billion is.  I guess one answer is, "Less than Microsoft plans to spend on buying Yahoo!"  From that perspective, having the federal government spend less than that over seven years seems like a good thing.  I'm sure we need good network security for our government.

But here's where a little perspective is helpful.  According to the article, "last year Infonetics Research estimated the entire worldwide network security appliance and software market to have reached $5 billion in 2007."

So we (it is our money after all) are going to spend more on networks security in one year than the worldwide market for network security appliances and software?

One final quote from the article.  "Unfortunately, the White House is being tight-lipped about the plan, citing that to explain the plan publicly would jeopardize security."

Wow.  Even if there is a big chunk of money allocated for speech-recognition enabled password reset products, that seems like an awful lot of money to me.  It makes Yahoo! seem like a bargain.

You can read the article here.