Software piracy is a problem which must be addressed, yet there is something else which is becoming more popular, it is said.

Julian Swan, the EMEA director of compliance marketing for the Business Software Alliance (BSA), explained that while many may be actively buying "dodgy discs from car boot sales", software licensing is more of an issue than software piracy.

He said that this situation can arise from a business taking over a rival, where existing systems may be in place.

Mr Swan added: "They won't know, unless they're very thorough and organised, what software they've inherited from the company they've taken over. This is not all people deliberately doing it."

This, he explains, is why the organisation is actively raising the issue to ensure that people are aware of the laws they may be breaking.

At the end of March, Gartner predicted that the enterprise software market would weather the storm of sector revenue falls more effectively than it did during the last crash in 2001 and 2002.

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.