City businesses which embrace IT support in London can relieve themselves of responsibility for technology, it has been suggested.

David Bradshaw, European Software-as-a-Service and cloud services research manager at market intelligence firm IDC, noted that there are benefits to outsourcing IT support to managed hosting providers.

“The public cloud allows organisations to displace a problem and shift it into the cloud,” he commented.

Mr Bradshaw explained that a third-party application hosting firm will take care of all IT equipment, with the business user simply paying for the support services they require.

This enables smaller businesses to access the level of IT they require without being forced to make significant capital investment.

Internal IT employees then become responsible for managing the outsourcing contract and orchestrating in-house use, rather than looking after the actual systems, Mr Bradshaw said.

“Their job becomes not building and maintaining the systems, but perhaps using these systems most effectively and how to bring these systems together in the best and most effective way.”

Gartner recently claimed that public organisations looking to save money should consider investing in cloud computing in order to reduce costs.