Cisco Global Cloud Index reveals Cloud Traffic to quadruple by 2019
After the the fifth annual Cisco global cloud index(2014-19) forecast that global cloud traffic will more than quadrupleby the endof 2019,from 2.1 to 8.6 zettabytes(zb),outpacing the growth of total global data center traffic,which is forecast to triple during the same time frame (from 3.4 to 10.4 ZB). Several factors are driving cloud traffic’s accelerating growth and the transition to cloud services, including the personal cloud demands of an increasing number of mobile devices; the rapid growth in popularity of public cloud services for business, and the increased degree of virtualization in private clouds which is increasing the density of those workloads. The growth of machine-to-machine (M2M) connections also has the potential to drive more cloud traffic in the future.
Doug Webster, Vice-President of Service Provider Marketing, Cisco, explained, “The Global Cloud Index highlights the fact that cloud is moving well beyond a regional trend to becoming a mainstream solution globally, with cloud traffic expected to grow more than 30 per cent in every worldwide region over the next five years. Enterprise and government organizations are moving from test cloud environments to trusting clouds with their mission-critical workloads. At the same time, consumers continue to expect on-demand, anytime access to their content and services nearly everywhere. This creates a tremendous opportunity for cloud operators, which will play an increasingly relevant role in the communications industry ecosystem.”
In addition to the rapid growth of cloud traffic, Cisco predicts that the Internet of Everything (IoE) could have a significant impact on data center and cloud traffic growth. A broad range of IoE applications are generating large volumes of data that could reach 507.5 ZB per year (42.3 ZB per month) by 2019. Now only a small portion of this content is stored in data centers, but that could change as the application demand and uses of big data analytics evolve.
With the volume of stored data increasing, Cisco predicts a greater demand and use for consumer cloud storage. By 2019, 55 per cent of the residential Internet population will use personal cloud storage.
The Cisco Global Cloud Index (2014-2019) was developed to estimate global data center and cloud-based traffic growth and trends. The report serves as a complementary resource to existing Internet Protocol (IP) network traffic studies such as the Cisco Visual Networking Index, providing new insights and visibility into emerging trends affecting data centers and cloud architectures. The forecast becomes increasingly important as the network and data center become more intrinsically linked in offering cloud services.
