The Professional Services Council (PSC) is boosting its forecast for Federal civilian agency IT spending through 2027, to a 2.3 percent year-over-year growth rate over that period, up from its estimate of 1.8 percent growth last year.
Those figures come from the group’s Vision 2021 Federal Market Forecast that PSC made public on December 1.
The latest forecast also shows IT budgets for Federal defense agencies rising by 1.9 percent on a year-over-year basis through 2027, down from the group’s estimate of a 2.2 percent growth rate issue last year.
In other major Federal IT spending categories, PSC’s new report reckons that Fiscal Year 2022 spending on civilian agency cybersecurity will total about $4.0 billion, up from $3.78 billion in FY2021, with the FY2022 figure representing about five percent of the government’s total IT spending figure. The recent trends on cybersecurity spending reflect a 16 percent compound annual growth rate.
FY2022 spending on cloud services was estimated at $3.06 billion, up from a figure of $2.96 billion for FY2021. At the same time, shared services spending is seen coming in at $2.31 billion for FY2022, up from $2.19 billion in FY2021.
“IT modernization is increasingly being driven by agency mission outcome focus,” PSC said in its presentation. The group said that provisioned IT spend – consisting of managed services and cloud services – continues to be a “key means” of modernization efforts.
“Cybersecurity remains a top Federal focus from both a policy and funding perspective,” PSC said, driven by zero trust security efforts.
Also impacting Federal IT, the group said, are workforce challenges, with recent data suggesting that the government’s previously successful efforts to add people under the age of 30 to the IT workforce may be taking a hit over pandemic-related issues such as workplace location flexibility and leadership attention.
COVID-19 vaccine mandates, the group said, “are a potential major IT and workforce wildcard” going forward for Federal tech workforce levels.
PSC presenters said they gathered their data from the government’s performance.gov website, and said that the 100 percent data tagging rate in line with Technology Business Management (TBM) principles is allowing the group to pull greater insights form the data.
