Federal IT Trends: Looking Back, Looking Ahead - TechSource

With federal agencies busy wrapping up fiscal year 2014 IT projects, it’s a great time to look back at trends that shaped 2014 and look ahead to see what will likely shape 2015 priorities.

Looking Back

These were some of the top trends we saw in the federal IT space in 2014:

• The rapid, unceasing growth of data was a dominant theme and a major challenge for agencies, forcing them to carefully consider how they store data.
• Agencies embraced cloud computing with enthusiasm in fiscal year 2014. Their cloud strategies were motivated by an opportunity to save money, but they realized that cloud storage can also help them better execute their missions.
• Agencies also realized that cloud computing is really just part of their evolution from building things to becoming brokers of services.
• Over the past year we also saw agencies look more closely at shared infrastructure. Agencies understand that shared infrastructure can save money while providing secure multi-tenancy to their internal and external customers.
• The use of Flash is another new trend we see emerging among federal clients. Agencies are figuring out that flash provides superior performance when integrated into their storage architecture.
• More and more, agencies are tiering their data – determining what can be archived at a lower cost and what data is critical and requires solutions such as flash to ensure high performance.

Looking Ahead

As we look ahead to the upcoming fiscal year, we believe agencies will continue to look to cloud computing and make progress on efforts to consolidate data centers. We believe agencies will move to a hybrid cloud environment, with much of their infrastructure on premise, while taking advantage of private and public clouds.

Federal agencies’ journey to a hybrid cloud will force them to make some hard choices. They will face difficult decisions on consolidating applications. They must also figure out how to control, secure and manage data in a hybrid cloud environment. Agencies have to make sure they can move data once it’s in the cloud, but they don’t always consider that prior to their strategic decision to migrate data to the cloud.

We also expect IT spending to remain constrained at federal agencies. In some cases agencies will have to be creative in order to invest in innovative solutions, but cost constraints will also drive more interest in cloud computing, software-defined storage, and delivering IT-as-a-service.