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Up to date technology is essential to small businesses wishing to do business with larger or more established companies and it can also deliver significant cost savings.

Phil Flaxton, spokesperson for IT support standard organisation Technology Means Business, said that supply chain pressures have forced some companies to invest in new technology.

"If they're supplying larger organisations and those organisations themselves have implemented new technology and new methods of work, the smaller businesses that supply to them will need to interact with them in that way," he said.

This is particularly true in the retail sector, according to Mr Flaxton, where supermarkets have insisted that "antiquated methods of communicating" be abandoned and that smaller firms "would have to get up to date to enable ease of processing orders".

But it's not just trading relationships that can benefit from implementing new technology, the balance sheet can improve too.

"For those who are early adopters and are prepared to look at implementing new technology there are of course substantial cost savings that can be achieved by using VoIP and things like Skype," Mr Flaxton said.

According to recent survey by Connect, the two biggest IT headaches for businesses were 'everyday hassles with IT' (37 per cent) and 'security concerns' (32 per cent).