Pressured to meet new objectives on increasingly tight budgets, more and more government agencies are turning to the cloud in pursuit of operational efficiencies. MarketsandMarkets estimates that federal demand for private, public and hybrid solutions will balloon over the next few years as historically bureaucratic and slow moving departments work to catch up on social priorities.

“There are numerous upcoming trends in Government Cloud Market, which creates enhanced opportunities for the citizens and other small departments. The collaborative and content development tools are enabling services providers to offer world-class cloud experience to the agencies. There are many tools and software applications that are entering into this market. The solutions and services are facilitating the establishment of successful infrastructure facilities for government organizations,” MarketsandMarkets wrote.

The Dallas-based research firm predicts that the global government cloud market, which encompasses on-premise deployments as well as infrastructure, platform and software-as-a-service, will expand at a compound annual growth rate of 45.1 percent through 2018. The segment is expected to achieve $18.48 billion in revenue by then, more than six times the estimated $2.87 billion generated in 2013.

MarketsandMarkets sees cultural barriers and mismanagement as “substantial factors” in slowing government cloud adoption, but anticipates that these challenges will be overshadowed by growth drivers like the need to reduce costs and communicate more effectively across agencies. Not unexpectedly, North America will remain the biggest market for government cloud solutions for the foreseeable future, but Asia Pacific is expected to come out on top in the long run.

Rising demand means more competition. Earlier this year, IBM lost out on one of the largest government cloud deals in history to Amazon, which will set up a state-of-the-art cloud environment for the CIA as part of a $600 million dollar contract spanning four years.