SAN FRANCISCO – Results from TechTarget?s 2013 annual salary and careers survey, which looked at IT security professionals and IT personnel who spend their time on security, shows that total compensation (salaries, bonuses and commissions) is holding steady. More than half of those surveyed reported raises in 2013, and close to one-third received bonuses.
The salary survey was conducted in the third quarter of 2013. The information was based on the responses of 350 security practitioners, gleaned from a larger sample of 1,711 IT professionals. Titles in the security group ranged from chief security officer and chief information officer (10 percent) to security manager (22 percent), senior IT executive (19 percent), IT staff (10 percent) and IT manager (9 percent).
More than half of the IT security respondents (51 percent) had been in their current jobs for 1 to 5 years; 22 percent had been in their positions 6 to 10 years, while 10 percent had served for 11 to 20 years. A significant number of those surveyed (16 percent) had worked in their current positions for less than one year. Of that group, one-quarter said they recently changed jobs because they wanted a new challenge, and a smaller number (14 percent) said they wanted more money.
When asked about the top three technology areas that occupied most of their time, 100 percent of those surveyed listed security, followed by compliance (39 percent), general IT management (28 percent), wide area and local area networking (17 percent), disaster recovery and business continuity (14 percent) and server management (11 percent). All other technology areas ranked less than 10 percent, including application security and design, business process management and mobile technology (8 percent); data analysis and analytics and cloud computing (7 percent); application management (6 percent); and data center management, data management and help desk (5 percent).
The majority of survey respondents worked for enterprise-level organizations with an average IT headcount of 1,449. What’s the mood at these organizations? Almost one-quarter of respondents (24 percent) said optimistic; more than one-third said pessimistic (34 percent); and the rest were neutral (42 percent). Whether or not the economy is still having a negative effect on IT security compensation, the glass appears half full at some organizations.
