This month showed the trend of continuing strength in industry growth. Several merges and acquisitions were in the spot light, including NetSec, Inc. which was acquired by MCI (www.mci.com).

C I Host announced the results of a recent survey, polled from their 215,000 clients worldwide.  The survey showed that small- to medium-sized businesses will expand in 2005 through capital investment and Internet marketing, while hiring will experience healthy increases.

According to the research, organizations head further and further into uncharted waters as they struggle to strike a balance between security and the pursuit of business opportunity.

The IDC (www.idc.com) Security Forum West: Investigating the Next Frontiers in Security and Business Continuity, is to be held May 11, 2005 in San Francisco.

Google stepped in the domain registrar area in January. Google (www.google.com) is now an ICANN-accredited registrar of domain names, providing it with yet another potential line of expansion. The fast-growing search provider has been approved to sell names in seven top-level domains (TLDs) including .com, .net, .org, .biz., info, .name and .pro.

Reduction in price for web hosting packages was one hot news in the industry for January. 1&1 Internet announced on January 24th that they will now provide free full-featured web hosting accounts for up to six months.

On the security field, Symantec Corp. announced the new version of its network intrusion detection software solution, Symantec Network Security 4.0. The software provides multi-gigabit intrusion detection, scalable centralized management and advanced security intelligence to protect against threats and intrusions.

"Medium and large enterprises require sophisticated intrusion protection that can outpace new and emerging threats while protecting critical business assets," said Greg Gotta, vice president of product delivery, Symantec Corp.

The following is a summary of industry milestones through the first month of the year.

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