01 Jul 2009

SMEs 'turn to cloud for storage'

Small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are turning to cloud-based storage solutions as a result of the constraining of IT budgets and the benefits which these services can bring, it has been claimed.

David Pratt, chief operations officer at ThinkGrid, said that many companies are now looking to take on cloud-based hosted exchange services to improve their data storage capacity and to reduce costs.

He commented: "[Cloud servers] give an organisation additional agility and they give you enterprise level IT without having the expense. SMEs just haven't got the budget or resources to pour into their IT."

A report published by global IT consultancy IDC in March forecast that the uptake of cloud-based systems will accelerate considerably for the remainder of the year.

It added that businesses will also look to invest in IT solutions such as Software as a Service and cloud storage in order to improve data availability and flexibility for IT infrastructure.