The Comprehensive Spending Review will impact front-line services despite government promises that they will be protected from austerity measures. This is the key finding from a survey of senior decision makers in public sector finance functions. The research was carried out among 100 senior public sector finance officers by ComRes on behalf of VMware.

Two thirds of respondents believe that front line services will be hit and over half have already looked at reducing the headcount. Only one fifth of respondents admit to being ready to tackle the impending spending reductions.

VMware, the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, is calling for public sector organisations to look towards IT to help achieve the spending cuts. The www.smartsavingsideas.com website has been set up to share best practice and showcase examples where public sector bodies have achieved significant savings and become more agile organisations through smarter use of technology.

The report highlights how many public sector organisations are already seeing the financial and operational benefits of virtualising their IT infrastructures and moving towards a smarter way of provisioning IT. It highlights savings of £310,000 made by Liverpool Women’s and Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trusts and of £500,000 saved by Stockport College in server hardware costs, by moving to a virtualised IT infrastructure.

Virtualisation, which gives the ability to run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine, is seen as the route to substantial savings in IT across the public sector.