During 2004, the majority of the IS budget of Western European small and medium businesses was absorbed by internal overheads such as personnel and facilities expenses (51%). Only 20.2% of the total IS budget was dedicated to new IT initiatives, confirming SMBs’ moderate investments during 2004, IDC says. 31% of SMBs expect to increase their IS budget. The insurance/other finance and retail/wholesale sectors show the highest willingness to increase budget in 2005. A low percentage of public sector (government and education) institutions expect to increase their budget. The high penetration (95.54%) of security technologies is a consequence of the emergence of the Internet as the main computing platform in the enterprise, which has resulted in high security demand among SMBs. 87.2% of SMBs have plans to continue investing in antivirus software.