IT Spending Growth & Growing Federal IT Security Concerns

Here’s a roundup of some of last week’s most interesting cloud computing news.

IT Spending Up in 2012

IDC announced today their 2012 IT growth estimates. ZDNet’s Larry Dignan highlighted a few of the research firm’s key growth estimates in 2012:

• Hardware and software spending to increase 6 percent.
• IT services spending will grow at a 4 percent.
• Smartphone spending to jump 46 percent.

Particularly good news for U.S. IT spending growth: IDC projects a 5 percent increase in 2012 compared with Europe, where IT spend will likely top off at less than 1 percent.

Federal IT Pros’ Security Concerns

We’ve written before about the U.S. government’s initiative to move to the cloud. Recently, InformationWeek’s J. Nicholas Hoover wrote about some of the responses this program has received from federal IT managers. According to a survey, security is the biggest concern, with many federal IT pros concerned about accidental (or not) breaches by employees. A potential solution? Only employ providers that comply with the Federal Information Management and Security guidelines.