The White House's 2012 budget devotes a greater percentage of IT funds to cybersecurity

While President Obama's fiscal 2012 budget requests relatively flat funding for information technology governmentwide, a greater portion of the funds are expected to go toward security.

Some of the money for new cybersecurity investments will come from dollars saved by shifting infrastructure to the cloud, federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra told reporters on Wednesday.

The proposed overall IT budget is $79.5 billion, a slight increase over last year's $79 billion proposal. The Obama administration is attempting to save money by phasing out costly in-house systems and outsourcing the equipment and services to Web-hosting companies that offer access to the same tools via remote, shared servers. The so-called cloud-first policy directs agencies to consider acquiring Web-based IT instead of developing new systems, if the cloud products are equally secure.

At the same time, the budget plan would reassign some of that funding for software that continuously monitors federal networks for potential attacks. The proposal includes $459 million, a 21 percent increase over last year's $379 million request, to support the National Cybersecurity Division, which the Homeland Security Department oversees.

"The threat is growing," Kundra said in explaining the reason for increased cyber spending. "It's grave, and it's real."

To detect computer vulnerabilities, DHS officials will deploy governmentwide "red teams" that will try to penetrate agency systems and "blue teams" that will be responsible for fending off the cyber intruders.

"We actually want people at DHS attacking our own systems so we can fix them," he said.

Over several years, the administration intends to transfer $20 billion in existing IT spending to the cloud. The goal is to "shift away from asset ownership to service provisioning," Kundra said.

"Because of the budget pressures that agencies are experiencing and because of the fact we're going to be shutting down 800 data centers [by 2015] a lot of that is going to be spending that's already there," he said. "Cloud first is not about more spending. It's actually about cutting down significantly the wasteful spending."