Portability Challenges For Government Agencies Moving To Hybrid Clouds

The inaugural IDC Government Insights report, released earlier this year, paints a revealing picture of how the U.S. Federal Government is spending and planning to spend information technology (IT) dollars on cloud solutions.

The report projects that federal cloud services spending will reach $1.7 billion in FY2014, and, boosted in part by U.S. Federal CIO Cloud Council efforts the past few years to usher agencies away from standalone computing to the Cloud, we are starting to see more tangible evidence of not only federal agency cloud spending, but also results.

A key report finding is that while overall cloud spending will accelerate, federal agencies in the near-term will continue to leverage different cloud types (private, hybrid, public) based on their specific agency needs and concerns. The leading category of government cloud service is private, but public clouds and hybrid clouds continue to gain traction. As a result, many federal agencies will be employing a multi-cloud architecture.