Cloud traffic to quadruple over five years

Doug Webster

Global cloud traffic will more than quadruple between now and the end of 2019, growing from 2.1 to 8.6 zettabytes and outpacing the growth of global data centre traffic, according to research by Cisco Systems.

According to  Cisco’s Global Cloud Index, global data centre traffic will grow from 3.4 to 10.4ZB over the same period. Cloud data growth will be driven by personal cloud requirements for mobile devices, the popularity of public cloud services for business and the growing degree of virutalisation in private clouds. Machine-to-machine communications has the potential to drive more cloud traffic in the future, according to Cisco. According to Cisco, 10.4ZB is equivalent to 6.8 trillion hours of HD movies viewed online, or 1.2 trillion hours of UHD viewing.

Internet of Everything applications could generate data volumes of 507.5ZB a year by 2019, 49 times the predicted volume for data centre traffic.

Cisco predicts that 55% of residential internet users will use personal cloud storage by 2019, up from 42% in 2014, with demand for cloud storage being driven by mobile data traffic volumes, which are likely to exceed the amount of data stored on mobile devices worldwide.

Cisco estimates that the proportion of data stored on PCs will fall from 73% today to 49% by 2019, as data moves to mobile devices.

Public cloud growth will exceed private cloud growth, with public clouds accounting for 56% of cloud workloads by 2019, up from 30% in 2014. Private cloud workloads will fall from 70% to 44% of the total over the same period.

“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 percent in every worldwide region over the next five years,” said Doug Webster, vice president of service provider marketing, Cisco.

“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.”