Cloud traffic is expected to increase almost four times in the next four years, a new report by Cisco says. The recently unveiled Cisco® Global Cloud Index (2015-2020), it says that cloud traffic will go up from 3.9 zettabytes (ZB) per year in 2015 to 14.1 ZB per year by 2020.
There are a couple of factors to this growth. Firstly, business workloads dominate data centre applications. These will grow more than twofold in the next five years, while the overall share of data centre workloads will fall to 72 per cent, down from 79. Consumer workloads, on the other hand, even though are lesser in number, will grow faster.
A 3.5-fold growth is expected by 2020. By that time, they will have accounted for 28 per cent of total data centre workloads. Internet of Things and analytics database workloads will grow most in terms of share. By 2020, they will hold 22 per cent of total business workloads. And finally, video and social networking will see biggest growth in consumer workloads.
“In the six years of this study, cloud computing has advanced from an emerging technology to an essential scalable and flexible part of architecture for service providers of all types around the globe,” said Doug Webster, Vice President of Service Provider Marketing, Cisco.
“Powered by video, IoT, SDN/NFV and more, we forecast this significant cloud migration and the increased amount of network traffic generated as a result to continue at a rapid rate as operators streamline infrastructures to help them more profitably deliver IP-based services businesses and consumers alike."
