Cloud computing may be heavily promoted at the top levels of the federal government, including a mandate to review cloud-based options first. However, only 18% of government agencies indicate they have plans to purchase cloud-based solutions over the coming year. 
This comes from CompTIA’s Second Annual Government IT Purchase Plans study. The top demands from government IT decision makers: increasing efficiency and reducing long-term costs.
At the top of government IT spending priority lists for the coming year are backup and recovery solutions (39%), followed by security applications (37%), virtualization solutions (30%), content management solutions (24%), unified communications (18%), and cloud computing (18%).
Of course, it can be argued that it wouldn’t make sense to put “cloud computing” in the budget — an organization does not adopt cloud for cloud’s sake. Perhaps there is some cloud behind those backup and recovery plans? And we know those virtualization plans have to also offer private cloud.
CompTIA is a non-profit association for the information technology industry.
(Photo by the author.)
