Three years ago, the White House mandated a “cloud first” strategy for its IT spending in order to increase efficiency, reduce costs and improve the delivery of government services. Today, U.S. federal government cloud spending is on the rise as government agencies beat their own predictions for fiscal 2014.

While the federal 2014 IT budget was predicted to include $2.2 billion on cloud-related spending, the actual spend will be over $3 billion—a difference of almost $800 million, IDC reports.