Small and medium-sized businesses are looking at different methods to invest in their IT needs, with a new survey finding changes to the usual trends which preceded this year's results.

AMI-Partners discovered that nearly 60 per cent of respondents are now looking to put money into hosted services which can be found in the form of software-as-a-service or online data backup, which in turn shows a 100 per cent increase in interest from companies on the previous year.

AMI's vice-president of marketing Chad Thompson said of the situation: "What we are seeing in the SMB space right now is anything but 'business as usual'.

"SMBs are re-evaluating the way their businesses run on a number of fronts, including where and how they spend money, how they drive revenues and how IT supports these goals."

AMI is a consultant research firm which has been known to assist a wide variety of Fortune 100 companies through impartial research, working across the globe in 15 countries.

New research from Connect found that, on average, it takes businesses that use backup tapes take 11.6 hours to retrieve and restore files. Connect is now recommending that SMEs switch to online backup.