UK businesses spend more on legacy IT and less on innovation - report

Fifty-three per cent of IT budgets in the UK are spent on legacy systems, with only 34 per cent on new equipment and apps

UK businesses spend more of their budgets on legacy equipment than French and South African firms but less on innovation, according to a report commissioned by IP networking vendor Sonus Networks.

Sonus surveyed 465 IT decision-makers across the UK, France, Germany and South Africa and found that 53 per cent of IT budgets in the UK are currently being spent on maintaining legacy systems compared with only 44 per cent in France and 46 per cent in South Africa. Germany had the highest proportion of spend on legacy systems with 58 per cent.

The report, dubbed Removing the barriers to business transformation, found that German, French and South African organisations are placing more importance on innovation, with 41 per cent, 36 per cent and 46 per cent of their IT budgets respectively being spent on introducing new equipment and applications, compared with only 34 per cent for UK companies.

And despite 70 per cent of UK businesses wanting to spend more time on transformation and innovation, more than half (52 per cent) believe that innovation is being stifled by a lack of budget. A smaller proportion of French, German and South African firms used the same excuse.

When the IT decision-makers were quizzed on security policies, the UK fared stronger than its German counterparts. For example, 32 per cent of UK respondents noted that a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack prevention strategy was in place – compared with only 21 per cent in Germany. And packet and signalling encryption was also more prevalent in the UK (38 per cent) than Germany (21 per cent).

The survey was carried out in July 2013 by Research Now, with a minimum of 100 IT decision-makers being surveyed for each country.