Cloud data traffic expected to quadruple

Cisco is predicting that the amount of data traffic in the cloud will more than quadruple by 2019.
The California IT equipment and service company says global cloud traffic will increase from 2.1 to 8.6 zettabytes (ZB). This growth will outpace the traffic in data centres, which is forecast to triple during the same time frame (from 3.4 to 10.4 ZB).
The increasing number of mobile devices is one factor accelerating the growth in cloud traffic, writes Cisco in a press release. Other factors include the growing popularity of public cloud services for businesses, and the increased degree of virtualization in private clouds.
Cisco also predicts that the Internet of Everything (IoE) — the connection of people, processes, data and things — will impact the growth in digital trafic. The company says 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. To put this number in perspective, 10.4 ZB equals 144 trillion hours of streaming music, enough for about 26 months of continuous music streaming for the world’s predicted population of 7.6 billion people in 2019.
Today, 73 per cent of data stored on client devices resides on PCs, Cisco says. By 2019, the majority of stored data (51 per cent) will move to non-PC devices.
Cisco also notes that new technologies such as SDN and NFV are expected to streamline data centre traffic flows. And it says that in 2019 North America will have the highest cloud and data centre traffic volumes, followed by Asia Pacific and Western Europe.
To read Cisco’s detailed press release, click here.