Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) may want to consider outsourcing their server requirements as they may lack the ability to do this cost-effectively in-house, according to an expert.

Phil Turnbull, product manager at Hostway, stresses the importance of servers as organisational IT demands grow, saying they are the “lifeblood” of businesses.

He adds that they need to be fast, secure and easily scalable to cope with peaks and troughs in traffic and to provide a home for new hosted applications that employees need to access.

“Small and medium sized companies … should think seriously about whether their needs would be better served by outsourcing to an externally hosted platform, be that a cloud or other virtualised solution,” Mr Turnbull says.

He explains that SMBs can benefit from enterprise-level support and infrastructure by using IT outsourcing, as well as potentially paying only for what they use.

According to a recent report by IDC, the IT industry’s expansion to the cloud will accelerate this year as the poor economy drives more businesses to lower costs.