With Spotify celebrating its first anniversary last week, office workers across the country have started using it instead of radio, though this could have a bad effect on technology used in the environment.

Nigel Hawthorn, the vice-president of European, Middle Eastern and African marketing at Blue Coat Systems, took iPlayer as a basic example and underlined how a 30-minute programme can need a 320MB download.

As a result, the expert emphasised that only a handful of users of the internet at small businesses in IT are needed on a work network "to cause problems for business applications".

Commenting on another trend, Mr Hawthorn said: "The problem with Spotify on the other hand is that it is constantly downloading data, taking up valuable bandwidth."

Without visibility of these applications, Mr Hawthorn warned that organisations will "remain oblivious to the vulnerabilities" that "bandwidth-hungry applications" may bring to the overall network.

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.