Recession has made us more efficient say CIOs

The recession may have had one good knock-on effect: it made enterprises more efficient when it comes to IT. According to a survey from Rackspace, 62 percent of organisations believe that the recession forced their organisation to make some tough decisions that were beneficial, but they would not have made under normal market conditions.

However, the good news is that the research also indicated that companies were set to spend more: 81 percent of organisations expected to increase IT spending in the current year. 

The survey also suggested that there was an increasing interest in cloud computing. Fabio Torlini, head of cloud, Rackspace said that this was due to the coincidence of cloud computing and the recession happening at the same time. "We've gone through other recessions without a change in the way that we've looked at computing. Previously the mainframe was dominant in the organisation, cloud computing has emerged at the same time as people are looking to make their systems more efficient," he said.

Torlini admitted that cloud computing hadn't penetrated large companies in the way that some of the hype suggested but said that it wasn't true that there was no interest."We get plenty of enquiries every day about cloud computing. Companies are using it in test and development environments," he said. "Large enterprises haven't yet moved across the board to take up cloud - but give it time," he said.