SMEs stuck in tech dark ages

IT Pro says.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the UK use fax machines more than smartphones, according to research.

The Intel Business Index - an independent study of 3 000 IT decision-makers and IT users in companies with less than 250 employees - shows that despite the perceived popularity of tablets, they are currently used for work purposes by just 1.4% of IT users. In contrast, a laptop is used by 36.4%, and a smartphone by 16.2% of IT users, SME Web reports.

According to the study, SMEs are also putting themselves at risk of data breaches because of a lack of awareness around security regulations and investment in security technologies.

According to Business Cloud News, unsurprisingly, the Intel study also revealed that a number of its respondents (one in 10 of IT decision-makers) have been the victim of an IT incident in the last 12 months, which resulted in business downtime.

Despite this and many recent, widely publicised security breaches by enterprises, most SMEs (64%) spend less than 10% of their IT budgets on protecting their business against security breaches. Only 6.8% of SMEs use between 21% and 40% of their IT budgets on security.

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of Intel's study was the current level of SME cloud adoption. Despite many other recent studies suggesting otherwise, only 13.8% of IT decision-makers said they had bought into 'cloud services'. Moreover, nearly half (49%) of IT users and a quarter (23%) of IT decision-makers were not even sure what cloud computing was.