At a time when the economic outlook is less than certain, Europe’s small and medium businesses (SMBs) are primarily focusing their IT spending on security and cost efficient initiatives such as VoIP, IDC has claimed.

According to the analyst, SMBs looking to gain efficiencies are optimising the IT infrastructure of their organisations, with server and storage consolidation, system virtualisation, storage area network (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS).

Research from the company revealed that 12.9 per cent of companies have invested or are planning to invest in all of the above stated technology areas, while those that have invested in some areas are more likely to be open to further IT spending.

Giuliana Folco, research vice president of European industry solutions at IDC, said: “Vendors should market infrastructure technologies as solutions, emphasizing the specific SMB needs that they can help to address, such as compliance requirements, cost savings, and flexibility.”

Recently, Gartner claimed that spending on business intelligence (BI) will increases this year among all enterprises, adding that BI is more resilient against the effects of a possible downturn in IT spending than other technologies because of the high priority the platform is given by chief information officers.