Jobs aren't exactly easy to come by these days, but for those employed as security professionals, 2009 wasn't all that bad, a new survey suggests. According to ISC Squared, 55 percent of U.S. security pros said their salaries went up in 2009.

ISC Squared pinged more than 3,000 global technology security pros, over half of which were from the U.S. Of those, 800 claimed to have hiring authority, with 50 percent saying they expect to hire either full-time help or contractors in 2010.

"The results from our latest Career Impact Survey show that in a very difficult economic environment, organizations are placing an even higher value on the work that information security professionals do," W. Hord Tipton, executive director for ISC Squared, said in a statement. "It's a sign of the private and public sectors' ever-increasing dependence upon the stability and security of the online world, providing a plethora of career opportunities for knowledgeable, qualified, motivated security professionals."

The respondents represented a wide range of industries, including government, IT, professional services, and banking.

IT managers have had plenty to complain about ever since the economy took a nosedive and companies starting make cuts, and according to Symantec's "State of the Data Center" report, half of all IT execs surveyed say their data centers are under manned.

"We recently actually lost 25 percent of our departments in cutbacks," one network manager in New York told researchers. "I'm now doing a number of different jobs. I work from home and on the weekends doing things I never had to do before. I am just trying to do more with less. We could use more people, but right now, it doesn't seem to be an option."

Some 16 percent of those surveyed said that their data centers were extremely understaffed, while the other 34 percent said

According to a recent survey by Accenture on IT investments, information technology  will play a key role in the global economic recovery. Accenture noted that about 72 percent of business and IT execs say their "organizations place greater value on the IT function today than they did before the economic crisis," and believe that IT will prove integral to getting the economy back on track.

"The results of the survey show that firms recognize the need to invest in technology to defend and accelerate their competitive position, even in difficult times, which has not always been the case in the past," said Keith Haviland, Accenture's Global Managing Director for Systems Integration Consulting. "The turmoil over the last 18 months has underscored the need for further flexibility and scalability to stay ahead in business and drive agile business change."

Many execs said they expect technology spending to increase in their organization either selectively (47 percent) or across the board (10 percent) in the next year. Perhaps more surprisingly, around 61 percent of the non-IT executives pinged said they expect IT spending to rise.