Cisco says cloud traffic to triple by 2019

The rise of cloud traffic will be stopped by neither the collapse of Safe Harbor nor the election of CISA, suggested Cisco’s new Global Cloud Index (GCI) forecast – though traditional data centers are very much a slowing business. Lower data centre tiers could carry over 40 ZB of traffic per year. Cisco’s Cloud Index complements its Visual Networking Index. Cisco also predicts the Internet of Everything (IoE) will generate a mind-bending 507.5 ZB per year – 42.3 ZB per month – by 2019. That’s 49 times greater than the projected global data center traffic.

Global cloud traffic will nearly triple in the near future, suggested the GCI report for 2014-2019, which reckons that while 73 per cent of data was stored on client PCs at the beginning of the period, the majority (51 per cent) of stored data will move to non-PC devices by 2019.

The report is based on information harvested from multiple analyst firms and worldwide agencies (including Gartner, IDC, Juniper Research, Ovum, Synergy, ITU and the United Nations).

Webster noted that enterprise and government organizations are moving from test cloud environments to trusting clouds with their mission-critical workloads.

Concurrent with this will be a fourfold growth in global cloud traffic from 2014-2019, and a tripling of global data center traffic.

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Stored data moving from PCs to non-PC devices will contribute to this personal cloud growth. At the same time, consumers continue to expect on-demand, anytime access to their content and services almost everywhere.

Public cloud workloads will grow by 44 percent while private cloud workloads will grow just 16 percent between 2014 and 2019.

“This creates a tremendous opportunity for cloud operators, which will play an increasingly relevant role in the communications industry ecosystem”, he adds.

Personal cloud storage will drive a few of this growth with 55 percent (more than 2 billion users) of the consumer Internet population will use personal cloud storage by 2019, up from 42 percent (1.1 billion users) in 2014. Forty-four percent will be in private cloud data centers, down from 70% in 2014.

North America will have the highest cloud traffic volume (3.6 ZB) by 2019; followed by Asia Pacific (2.3 ZB) and Western Europe (1.5 ZB).

By 2019, 56% of the cloud workloads will be in public cloud data centers, up from 30% in 2014.

By region, North America will also have the highest data centre traffic volume (4.5 ZB) by 2019; followed by Asia Pacific (2.7 ZB) and Western Europe (1.8 ZB).

Cisco attributes the anticipated rapid growth of cloud traffic – which would represent 83 percent of total data center traffic in 2019 – to the technology’s acceptance into the mainstream.