No secret that compliance spending has been heading north since Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II. But is it doing any good?

Not according to a survey published in Steve Brown's Network Observations blog.

The study's findings suggest that the tsunami of laws and regulations has left us with a bunch very confused compliance officers, CIOs and IT specialists. Only a fraction felt their network tools were sufficient to cope with the regulations, even fewer said they would be able to track a security breach and only half were confident that they could monitor prohibited network use.

As Steve says, it's about the difficulties these managers now face negotiating their way through a clutter of laws and wild vendor claims. It's not about spending more money. Although chances are that will be the solution the companies come up with.