01 Jun 2009

IT failure 'the spur to upgrade'

Companies have been warned that in the majority of instances businesses do not consider the need to upgrade their IT infrastructure until a major system breaks down.

Ganesh Selvarajah, adviser at Business Link, said that small businesses in particular can be prone to this problem, with firms not placing enough emphasis on the importance of updating data handling systems regularly.

As a result, disaster recovery professionals will often have to be called in to recover lost data, something which can significantly affect the long-term stability of a small business.

He commented: "The equipment [is updated] usually only when there's been a system failure or their applications are getting very resource hungry and therefore the hardware can't cope."

According to a study recently carried out by Forrester Research, global IT purchases are set to decline by three per cent in 2009 to $1.66 trillion (£1.16 trillion).

This represents a fall from last year, with 2008 reporting an eight per cent increase in purchases in comparison to the previous year.