Small businesses have historically hired independent, local consultants to manage their IT functions and troubleshoot problems, but many are now outsourcing IT tasks to national technology companies.

According to a Wall Street Journal report, U.S. small businesses spent $23.5 billion on IT services last year, but research firm IDC expects that figure to reach $27.2 billion by 2015. Companies are using external IT services to install new computers and devices, administer software upgrades, establish security protections and help when any technology issues arise.

"We can do 99 percent of the work remotely," Paul Chisholm, CEO of a IT and cloud services provider, told the source. "More and more customers want to go to the cloud, and the independents and small regional providers don't have the financial capital and expertise to develop scalable cloud offerings."

The news source said many large technology companies view small businesses as an untapped market for IT services, as they generally don't have the necessary funds to secure a full-time IT staff but desire many of the same products and services as large companies.

Cloud services have become a popular option for many traditional IT tasks, including disaster recovery, data storage and backup, application sharing and business intelligence. According to a recent survey, cloud computing will account for 34 percent of all data center traffic by 2015, up from 11 percent last year.