Report: IT Security Spending Set to Rise

A new report suggests the federal government will significantly increase spending on general IT security in the coming years and will drop even more cash for security products and services related to national security and emergency services.

The report, from research firm IDC Government Insights, predicts a 3.2 percent increase in general IT security spending across the federal sector -- from $2.3 billion in fiscal 2015 to $2.7 billion by fiscal 2020. The report predicts national security-related IT security will increase more than 9 percent over the same span -- from $3.7 billion to $5.7 billion.

The increased spending in the long term is a result of the government’s narrowed focus on cyberattacks and threats from groups like ISIS, as well as an evolution in the way IT security is practiced across the civilian, defense and intelligence sectors, according to the report.  

“Within the U.S. federal government, the very nature of IT security is changing,” Shawn P. McCarthy, research director at IDC Government Insights, wrote in the report. “At a time when security spending is reaching new heights, it's also apparent that the functions of cybersecurity, physical security, and national defense continue to merge. They are evolving into a tightly coupled market space -- to the point where it's difficult to talk about defense and homeland security without talking about multiple cyber elements.”

The report argues  IT security is undergoing immense change, in part, thanks to the growing, interconnected world of people, objects and infrastructure, known as the Internet of Things.

The category of IT security is also expanding from traditional IT protections, such as firewalls and network monitoring, to areas like monitoring terrorist communications.

Interestingly, the report suggests a decrease in general IT spending over the coming fiscal year – down 1 percent through fiscal 2016.

McCarthy told Nextgov in an interview the numbers in that sense are a bit misleading. New technologies like cloud computing, which agencies are using more frequently than ever, often bundle IT security within the bottom line. The Obama administration set aside close to $7 billion for provisioned services like cloud computing in the fiscal 2015 budget, but it’s not as if that money isn’t being spent on IT security.

“It’s like when you buy a car,” McCarthy said. “You don’t talk about how much you spent on the locks, but they’re there.”

In the same way, McCarthy said security spending is getting “blended into other efforts.”

Despite all the number crunching, there's a lot we still don't know about the federal government's total IT security budget.

The Obama administration plans to spend about $14 billion on IT security across the federal government, according to the fiscal 2016 budget blueprint released last year. 

However, $7.6 billion of that “is related to security connected to intelligence gathering, battles-space networks, command and control networks, and security for communications and computing associated with intelligence and reconnaissance.”

Most of that spending is classified, as is additional spending on cryptographic efforts and signal processing -- led by the National Security Agency -- and could total over $10 billion.

In other words, while analysts can see clearly how the IT security landscape in the federal sector is changing for about half of the dollars invested, they know next to nothing about how IT security is evolving in the black budget.  

(Image via Cienpies Design/Shutterstock.com)