A new report by IDC Government Insights predicts overall agency spend on cloud computing technologies for fiscal year 2016 will represent 8.5 percent of the federal government’s overall information technology budget.
That figure represents an increase from the 5-percent share reported for fiscal 2015 as the Federal CIO Council and Office of Management and Budget continue efforts to spur cloud adoption among agencies for their IT system with mobile devices and storage in mind, IDC Government Insights said Thursday.
Cloud spend will reach a total of $6.7 billion in FY 2016 and could represent a 50-percent share of the overall federal IT budget by 2018, IDC says.
Agencies are also changing how they label cloud categories due in part to what IDC calls the “fragmented nature” of the technologies that may not fit under definitions such as infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and software-as-a-service.
In FY 2015, the government added an “Other” category to account for cloud-based databases, application programming interfaces, shared services and other platforms and products some federal agencies believe do not fit under the other three categories.
IDC projects spend on “Other” cloud tools to hit $5 billion in FY 2016, followed by IaaS at $1.2 billion, then SaaS at $702.9 million and PaaS at $231.3 million.
