Cutting costs a top goal for government network managers.

• Author: Insinna, Valerie
• Position: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Information technology leaders in federal and local government view budget constraints as an even bigger threat to infrastructure than cyber-attacks, according to a Cisco-sponsored survey conducted in September.

"I think our customers are telling us that we have to help them with their budget constraint problem," said Larry Payne, Cisco vice president of federal sales. "It doesn't make a lot of sense to build a very robust network and IT infrastructure with robust security and a great cyberstrategy if you don't have the resources to maintain and operate and respond to issues."

Cybersecurity is expected to be the government's greatest IT investment in the next year, with 59 percent of respondents saying that funding will increase and 31 percent saying that funding would be maintained. Four hundred "decision makers and influencers" in the public sector took part in the survey, with respondents split between federal and local governments.

Somewhat surprisingly, only 28 percent believe spending on big-data analytics will expand in 2014. It is more likely that funding will be held level to current expenditures, about half of respondents said.

As more systems are networked together, "there's going to be a huge onset of data," Payne said. "The number of connections are estimated to grow three times by 2017. Well if the number of connections, the...