Almost half of all problems encountered in enterprise networks are caused by applications, new research claims.

A study by managed services provider Claranet found that applications are by far the greatest single threat to the resilience or availability of business-critical IT networks.

Up to 47 per cent of problems encountered in developing and maintaining enterprise web systems arise from applications, according to the study.

The research also found that enterprise IT managers spend 90 minutes each day maintaining application performance and availability, suggesting that applications maintenance costs businesses 540 hours a year in staff time alone.

Maintenance involves a range of laborious activities centred on the server, including constant monitoring, regular patching and backing-up, and administering user accounts.

Administrators often have to contend with a variety of servers and different operating systems which run a wide variety of applications.

"Server management is a time consuming and mundane task," said Olivier Beaudet, group chief operations officer at Claranet.

"Research has shown that 50 per cent of IT departments in the UK spend around 20 per cent of their time on server administration."