Companies are increasingly moving away from the traditional IT department set-up and embracing new 'cloud computing' technologies, it has been suggested.

According to controversial IT author Nicholas Carr, the long-term trend is towards outsourced data storage services.

Having previously ruffled the feathers of Microsoft and Intel with a 2003 Harvard Business Review article entitled 'Does IT Matter?', Network World reports that Mr Carr has now turned his attention to the inefficiencies of in-house data storage.

"In the long run, the IT department is unlikely to survive, at least not in its familiar form," he writes in his new book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google.

"It will have little left to do once the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centres and into the cloud. Business units and even individual employees will be able to control the processing of information directly, without the need for legions of technical people."

Mr Carr highlighted that the system of each company running their own data servers may provide a basic level of security protection, but it is also very inefficient.

"The replication of tens of thousands of independent data centers, all using similar hardware, running similar software, and employing similar kinds of workers, has imposed severe economic penalties on the economy," he writes.

"It has led to the overbuilding of IT assets in every sector of the economy, dampening the productivity gains that can spring from computer automation."

According to the author, one solution to this is the greater use of outsourced IT services managed by professionals, which firms can connect to and access their information securely.