In the spirit of cost cutting, Brown has also examined all of its IT contracts and gone back to vendors to ask for price breaks, whether it's straight discounts or extending contracts for lower rates. "It will not shock your vendors if you ask them," Sherry said. Brown has also done away with maintenance contracts for some products.

Another tip: come up with offsite storage exchange programs with other organizations. He acknowledges that there is a higher degree of collaboration in the educational field than the finance industry for this sort of thing.

Also offering advice was panelist Terri Curran, director of information security at consumer electronics maker Bose. She said: "Look outside your country but look inside your company."

What she meant by "look outside your country" is that there are plenty of free resources about security awareness, identity theft and the like available on government Web sites around the world (she specifically mentioned the Netherlands as having good videos and slide decks on antivirus and other topics). While all such documents won't directly apply across countries, she's found that you can pick and choose, and that it beats starting from scratch. She also mentioned Interpol as a good source of such documents.

What Curran meant by "look inside your company" is that you might find employees who are eager to help spread the gospel of IT security. Bose used to hire actors and script writers to put together security awareness videos, but now instead runs contests in which employees take on those roles. She says the videos are actually better, not to mention less expensive.