Cloud and virtualisation technologies are being widely considered by the public sector and future IT decisions are to be based on increasing efficiency, a survey has revealed.
The Insight EMEA survey said that 57 per cent of respondents in the public sector were now evaluating cloud-hosted applications, but that only 22 per cent had deployed cloud technologies.
67 per cent had deployed server virtualisation solutions to drive down IT costs and consolidate IT hardware, and others were found to be deploying or evaluating other virtualisation technologies like application or desktop virtualisation.
The survey said that 66 per cent believed the biggest influence on IT decision making over the next year would be increasing efficiency and reducing costs.
Responding to the survey, Guy Beaudin, public sector business development director at Insight said: "Based on this survey, the downturn is having a maintained effect on many organisations and their approach to IT spending. Organisations are considering their approach to how they source their IT requirements more carefully, and approaches based on cloud-hosted applications or shared services models are being implemented to meet the challenges of reduced budgets."
The survey also revealed that 40 per cent of respondents will be undertaking bite-sized projects that deliver value quickly.