The Rising Star of Platform-as-a-Service

Agencies across the federal government are adopting a development, security, and operations (DevSecOps) approach to capabilities that focuses on security throughout the software development lifecycle. And even though development operations can be done without using cloud computing, cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has become an important part of the government’s DevSecOps approach. This is in part a result of its availability. All of the large commercial cloud service providers make PaaS available in their environments alongside the other flavors of cloud delivery, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). In addition, however, the evolving use of PaaS by government hints at the extent to which cloud computing is no longer an emerging technology. Instead, it has become as common as cybersecurity capabilities and is in use at every federal agency.

PaaS Spending from Fiscal Year 2019 to 2021

In our latest report on the Federal Cloud Computing Market, 2022-2024, the Federal Market Analysis (FMA) team produced data showing how government spending on PaaS has been growing in recent years. This data shows that spending on PaaS, including contracts requiring both PaaS and SaaS or PaaS and IaaS work, basically doubled between FY 2019 and FY 2021.

PaaS Spending by Market Sector

The trend toward spending more on PaaS is particularly noticeable in the civilian sector where agencies such as Veterans Affairs ($265M spent in FY 2021) and Homeland Security ($133M in FY 2021) have led a big increase.

The Department of Defense (DOD) also spent more on PaaS each year since FY 2019, but whereas the civilian sector has seen 100% growth in PaaS spending, the DOD’ spending rose at a more modest pace of 82.5%.

Most Used Solutions

Concerning the PaaS platform used the most by government according to the spending data, that distinction falls to Salesforce. Agencies spent $444M on the Salesforce Government Cloud in FY 2021, outstripping other providers. Agencies spent an additional $101M on a combination of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure (it is often impossible to separate the two given the data), and another $90M on AWS alone in FY 2021. IBM and Appian also saw $14M in spending apiece.

Wrapping up, spending on PaaS is finally starting to accelerate. It is for this reason that the FMA team recently forecast total federal spending on just PaaS will grow to $720M by FY 2024 at a 3-year rate of 36%. When combinations of service delivery such as IaaS/PaaS and SaaS/PaaS are taken into account this rate of growth should be even higher.