Cybersecurity spending is expected to rise by at least a third as the government seeks to ward off attacks of both public and private corporate networks. The Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense will get the lion's share of the security spending.
For companies not in the cybersecurity business, the only way to extract sizable growth from federal IT spending this year will be to wrestle contracts away from rivals.
Although the U.S. government is the largest purchaser of hardware, software and IT services in the world, President Obama's latest budget proposal shows that -- with one notable exception -- selling technology to the feds this year is unlikely to be a growth business.
The budget calls for federal IT spending to rise just 1.3% this year, to $79.5 billion, as the government moves to slash its number of data centers by 40% by 2015. The growth figure follows a miniscule increase during the past fiscal year and, if adopted, will mean that IT spending will rise less than 2% in aggregate during the past two federal budget cycles.
(Information Week)
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