McAfee on Monday announced that it has rolled its SaaS security offerings into a new business unit.

The new unit will include all McAfee products delivered over the Internet, including security scanning, Web and e-mail security, and remote managed host-based software and hardware.

Early last month, Forrester Research published a report that found even during the recession, security spending will continue to increase, and that respondents said their security budgets would rise 12.6 percent in 2009, which is up from 7.2 percent in 2007 and 11.7 percent in 2008.

IDC, meanwhile, issued projections that the IT SaaS market will soar to nearly US$20 billion in 2012, up from about $9 billion in 2008. Indeed, InfoWorld collected information and insights from analysts and CIOs to determine that security is one of IT's top five spending priorities during tight times.

McAfee said that Marc Olesen, former vice president of SaaS at Hewlett-Packard, will head up McAfee's new SaaS Security Business Unit as senior vice president and general manager.