The report - the 2011 interim market report on information security recruitment – shows that salary increases for IT security staff changing employers rose to 13% in the first six months of 2011. This says the research firm, is higher than the 10% trend seen previously.
Interestingly, recruitment consultancy Barclay Simpson says that the annual salary increases achieved by the majority of IT security practitioners staying with existing employers have matched inflation - at best.
Delving into the report reveals that there are high number of jobseekers currently entering the recruitment market generally, and that salary increases were highest in the banking and financial sectors, followed by consultancies and systems integrators.
The analysis reveals that the IT security and business continuity recruitment market is currently experiencing patterns of supply and demand similar to those that existed prior to the recession.
Whilst demand recovered strongly in 2010, the report says it was heavily biased towards banking. Demand has broadened out across a wide range of end users and consultancies.
Barclay Simpson adds that the seeming increase in high profile attacks has resulted in ‘cyber security’ - as an issue - becoming a subject not to be ignored. The number of IT security practitioners employed in the economy, it observes, is growing and unemployment is rare.
The report predicts there will be a steady demand for the remainder of 2011. This will, it predicts, include risk assessment skills covering both applications and infrastructure and PCI-DSS skills.
Those people focusing on network security in the contract market, it says, are likely to benefit from an increase in demand for their services to counter hacking attacks. IT security consultancies, meanwhile, are likely to continue to be buoyed by spending on cloud security, PCI-DSS and the increased utilisation of penetration testing services
According to the report, salary increases for security practitioners changing employers rose to 12% in the first half of 2010. By the end of 2010 the average for the year had fallen back to 11%.
Although this was a fall, the average was still nearly twice the rate it was in 2009. The reason for the fall, given the overall buoyancy of the recruitment market, the analysis notes, was that many of the security practitioners moving in the first half of the year were doing so from low base salaries - they often, the report notes, accepted these during the recession and were looking to make good their previous losses.
And now the good news – Barclay Simpson says that, since that the IT security recruitment market has stabilised, salary increases will most likely level off around their historic average of around the 10% mark.
One potential threat to this, however, are developments in the public sector. Redundancies within the public sector have accounted for the majority of defensive registrations during the latter half of 2010.
Currently, says the report, there is a small but growing pool of redundant public sector information security practitioners. The existence of this pool has the potential to drive salary increases down in the public sector and the overall average.