With the recession eating away at IT budgets, a third of large UK companies are delaying infrastructure upgrades and software refreshes and turning to Cloud Computing instead.

According to the latest survey of IT infrastructure plans by the National Computing Centre (NCC). some 23% of the large and  multinational businesses polled say they are postponing hardware upgrades while a further 23% are postponing a software refresh. In total, 30% of companies are delaying upgrades to their IT infrastructure.

"The delivery of applications from a hosted environment - usually called software as a service (SaaS) - is growing in popularity," said Steve Fox,  managing director of the NCC's Evaluation Centre. He said 30% of companies see SaaS as either a very important (16%) or important (14%) technology. A further 30% see it as of  medium importance, with only 11% viewing it as of little importance and 7% as of no importance.

While 39% of companies have yet to  make up their  minds, so me 11% of companies said they see Cloud Computing as very important and 11% as important to their future infrastructure, with a further 18% viewing it as of  medium importance. "This confirms a trend that IT budgets are coming under severe pressure. Any projects that are non-essential or affect only the back office are coming under increased scrutiny," said Fox. "This will force companies to look  more seriously at alternative delivery infrastructure such as SaaS and Cloud Computing."

NCC interviewed  more than 100 companies. Some 24% of respondents were from the public sector, followed by IT & telecoms (15%), banking & finance (12%), professional services (12%)  manufacturing (10%), construction (8%) and healthcare (6%). Some 13% had turnovers of  more than £5 billion, 6% were in the £1 billion to £5 billion range, and 13% in the £500 million to £1 billion range, while 27% had turnovers between £100 million and £500 million, and 15% £50 million to £100 million.