Federal cloud spending projected to soar -- just not quite yet

New projections from Deltek's Federal Industry Analysis team predict that spending on federal cloud computing services will climb rapidly over the next five years, hitting $6.5 billion in fiscal year 2019.

The report projects a compound annual growth rate of 21 percent, even with an initial dip in spending due to cloud-adoption challenges.

Projected Federal Cloud Spending (2014 - 2019)

Deltek identified seven trends shaping many agencies' cloud investment decisions, including:

• Inadequate data governance and management policies made available to agencies.
• Security concerns for FISMA compliance and FedRAMP certification timelines.
• Insufficient resources to manage investments, calculate costs, and determine ROI.
• Cloud computing as a solution to inter- and intra-agency shared services goals.
• Adapting cloud environments for complex and classified missions.
• Military departments' cloud procurement independent of DISA.
• NIST's Cloud Computing Roadmap has provided standards for agency cloud procurement.

Civilian spending might be advancing more quickly than agencies are prepared to handle, the report suggests. The defense side has focused cloud initiatives on system preparedness, and spending on platform-as-a-service has fallen short of both infrastructure-as-a-service and software-as-a-service.

Additional details from the report are available here.