A significant amount of the problems encountered in developing and maintaining business web systems come from applications.

That is among the findings of research from Claranet, which discovered that up to 47 per cent of these problems relating to the availability or resilience of companies' business-critical IT networks stemmed from applications.

Applications maintenance also costs firms 540 hours a year on average, suggesting that IT support or outsourcing may be a way forward.

This maintenance includes monitoring and patching servers, and administering user accounts.

"Server management is a time consuming and mundane task," said Claranet group chief operations officer Olivier Beaudet.

"Research has shown that 50 per cent of IT departments in the UK spend around 20 per cent of their time on server administration."

Meanwhile, IT spending around the world is set to grow to more than $3 trillion this year, research from Gartner reveals.

In a recent survey of SMEs for Connect, the two most important benefits of outsourcing were 'guaranteed response times' and 'allowing in-house IT staff to concentrate on more strategic issues'.