Businesses hoping to make their information more secure may want to invest in cloud servers, it has been stated.

Dan Scarfe, chief executive officer of Dot Net Solutions, said that cloud servers such as those offered by computing giant Microsoft are able to keep data protected in a better way to the average server.

He questioned how safe current security systems were in offices, where a server could easily be sitting in an office with only the protection of a couple of deadlocks to prevent entry.

Mr Scarfe added that cloud computing required brand new and extremely large data centres that were protected physically and also in the general infrastructure sense.

He continued: "Some of the smartest guys in the world set up all of these data centres and the buildings themselves have huge amounts of security 24-7."

Microsoft's newest product, Windows Azure, was announced at the Professional Developers Conference on October 27th.

More than half of small businesses (53 per cent) believe that the most important benefit of outsourcing is guaranteed response times for IT support. London-based Connect conducted the research in 2007.