Businesses are putting off technology upgrades as they look to save money during the economic downturn.
As IT budgets are being scaled back, infrastructure upgrades and software-refresh projects are being delayed, according to research by the National Computing Centre (NCC).
Nearly a quarter (23 percent) of businesses surveyed by the NCC's Evaluation Centre said they will be postponing hardware upgrades, with the same proportion saying the same for software.
Almost a third (30 percent) of respondents said they're looking to delay IT-infrastructure upgrades.
Steve Fox, managing director of the NCC Evaluation Centre, said the results of the survey confirm a trend of IT budgets coming under severe pressure, causing projects seen as non-essential or only affecting back-office operations to be viewed as less of a priority. Fox added that businesses are increasingly looking at software as a service (SaaS) and cloud computing as a result.
The research found SaaS is becoming popular, with 30 percent of companies saying they see it as important or very important.
Infrastructure services provided online — or cloud computing — are also stirring interest, with 22 percent of companies regarding such services as important or very important to their future plans.
The survey took in responses from more than 100 companies, across various sectors, with turnover of between £5m and £5bn.
Talkback
The logic behind sticking with you legacy kit only works if you think this current recession will reverse in the near term.
If we don't see a turnaround in short order, businesses hoping to survive on legacy infrastructures will struggle to remain competitive.
That means they will be forced to look at innovative alternatives that they can afford.
Without wanting to state the bleeding obvious, free and open source software provides the only sustainable answer in the long-term.
The idea of trusting my business IT to cloud computing, a new untested technology in the hands of a company that, due to the downturn, might go feet forwards at any moment seems like a pretty silly idea to me.
As dogstar says, Open Source is a way of dropping your costs. It is also a way of moving outsourced hosting out of the expenses column and under your direct control by self hosting. This not only knocks a little off the bottom line costs, but also makes your company more, not less resilient against the failures of other firms. Added to that, it allows you to roll out innovative online solutions without having to up your hosting expenses.