Press Releases

Budapest, March 20, 2014 17:00

Hungarian small and medium enterprises are distrustful versus virtual office environment – as revealed by the survey conducted on the assignment of Magyar Telekom
Many are anxious about the costs of cloud services, most companies however are worried about their security – with no reason.

As the earlier representative research ^[1] made on t he assignment of Magyar Telekom, interviewing IT decision makers revealed, for SMEs employing 10-50 people to remain flexible, mobile in terms of IT and to keep their competitive edge, need to own such a tool park that enables employees to access their emails and the internet not only in the office, tied to their desks.

Surveys also revealed that this mobility is largely assisted by using office cloud services which employees can access anywhere and any time.

According to Telekom’s survey, close to two thirds of Hungarian SMEs use own office servers.  Only two out of every 100 SMEs in Hungary use cloud based services, like for example virtual servers operated by external service providers. „This latter solution not only eliminates data loss due to the machines going down, but also enables remote working and document sharing, while it also significantly decreases IT costs” –said Péter Lakatos, chief officer of Magyar Telekom, responsible for SME services. 
For the time being, Hungarian enterprises employing 10-50 people are distrustful vs. the virtual office environment and cutting edge IT solutions. Skeptical company leaders believe that their companies are not ready yet for an office based on cloud services: half of decision makers think that it would be difficult to implement in their companies. In more than one third of these companies the conditions of remote working are not provided, while in another one third of the enterprises this possibility is only available to employees to a limited extent. Remote working is only supported in every fourth SME; however accessing files and folders is made possible for employees by even less companies.

 Only a mere 13% of IT decision makers in the SME sector intend to choose cloud based services whenever possible. The solution - which they have limited information about – is not attractive to them. Majority of worries are based on uncertainty: 75% of decision makers basically had reservations about handing over the responsibility for operation to an external third party. „Worries concerning security breaches represented a significant part, while every second decision makers were concerned about the cost implications of the cloud based virtual office – although cloud based solutions in fact offer higher security, lower IT costs and offer higher IT flexibility and also improve work efficiency” – added Péter Lakatos.

Many, however are viewing the cloud based office environment as an attractive vision, somewhat more than one third of company decision makers are already considering this option.

Telekom, as market leader service provider targets to assist cost sensitive Hungarian companies in catching u pin terms of IT, by providing modern office tools, inevitable in business life. Reacting to market demands as well, and also intending to shape market requirements, from February 17, 2014 Telekom offers new office IT tools, primarily laptops and mobile internet packages enabling the most efficient use of them, to SMEs with no initial investment needed.  As part of the Telekom propositions, they also commission the ordered IT tools into use on the first occasion and save data stored on old tools onto the new tools, on location.  Telekom offers the Office software package for machines newly ordered. The large company category services of Office 365 are available to an enterprise of any size, including simple Word to presentation maker as well as programs enabling document sharing and business correspondence. Consequent to cloud services, Office programs are always available in the latest legally clean version, and using those by connecting to the internet company documents and emails are immediately available, making remote working outside the office easier.

Further information: www.telekom.hu/uzleti

[1] The survey was made between January 27 and February 5, 2014. Telephone interviews were conducted with people, who are decision makers concerning the procurement and operation of IT tools, in Hungarian SMEs using at least 3 IT tools (computer or laptop). The interviewed 202 companies are representative for the Hungarian SMEs employing 10-50, concerning company size, scope of activity and geographical region..