Channel can look forward to increased IT budgets from SMEs

Good news for the channel, over 60 percent of UK small to medium-sized enterprises expect their IT budget to increase in 2015.

The positive figure is from research carried out by cloud and data centre specialist Node4. It is the second year in a row that Node4’s survey of 250 IT decision makers at companies with between 50-500 employees, has revealed that the majority of SMEs are planning to spend more on their IT.

Although this year’s findings are slightly down from the 70 percent of SMEs that expected to increase their IT budgets in 2014, 7 percent of SMEs still expect to increase their technology spend by more than 10 percent, while only 1 in 20 are anticipating a decrease.

Two thirds of those surveyed singled out disaster recovery or business continuity as an IT service that is “critical” to their business, while over a quarter of respondents said the reliability of their IT infrastructure was a key concern. In addition, 23 percent of those surveyed highlighted security as a key issue, and 24 percent were concerned that their IT infrastructure is “reliant on hardware that might fail”.