Having completed a survey of 3,000 small businesses – defined as those with  under 250 employees – Intel says companies are also putting themselves at risk of data loss and breaching the law because they don't know the security regulations they are obliged to uphold.

Almost half of the respondents to the survey (46.3%) blamed a lack of man power and money for their failure to keep up to date with new technologies like cloud. Almost four in five (78.5%) said more money should be provided by government for training staff.

Furthermore, Intel intonates that there is a lack of correlation between the perceived security threat and action to its regard. It found that despite one in ten (9.4%) having suffered an IT incident over the last year which caused downtime, most SMEs (63.6%) spend less than 10% of their IT budget on protecting their business against security breaches.

Despite 42.3% of people using their own phones at work, only half (52.2%) of IT decision makers ensure that their business complies with the specific regulations relating to security devices. A third (36.5%) are unaware that they exit at all.

Graham Palmer, managing director for Intel in the UK, said: “It’s likely that the so-called consumerisation of IT is going to continue, and IT decision makers need to recognise that this, and the increasingly mobile workforce, will have huge data security implications. SMEs should educate staff on the need to keep an eye on their laptops, mobiles, and crucially, ensure that any sensitive data on devices is protected. The loss of intellectual property and not complying with data privacy regulations could hit SMEs hard from a financial point of view.” 

Tellingly, half (48.7%) of IT users and a quarter (23.3%) of IT decision makers aren’t even sure what cloud computing is, leading Palmer to the conclusion that “adoption is lagging behind the hype.”

Moreover, half of those that said they were using Google Docs said they weren’t using cloud.

“Cloud computing can be a very cost-effective option for many SMEs, but nobody should take the plunge without considering the impact on their business,” added Palmer.