The surge in cloud traffic points to increased adoption of the cloud and a move away from traditional storage, Cisco’s fifth annual Global Cloud Index report reveals.
According to the Index, increased demand for cloud storage, increase in adoption of cloud services by businesses globally and a surge in virtualization in private clouds have led to an increase in cloud traffic. Cisco notes in the report that the traffic will quadruple by the end of 2019 and this increase will put the growth of total global data center traffic in the shadow. Cisco believes that increase in machine-to-machine (M2M) connections or Internet of Things (IoT) also has the potential to drive more cloud traffic in the future.
Cisco revealed that global cloud traffic is expected to grow from 2.1 to 8.6 zettabytes. If we compare the increase in global data center traffic during the same timeframe, it will increase from 3.4 to 10.4 ZB.
Cisco also revealed that emergence and proliferation of Internet of Everything (IoE) i.e. the connection of people, processes, data and things, will also play a major role in increase in cloud data as well as data center traffic. Cisco says that IoE applications have the potential of generating large volumes of data that could reach 507.5 ZB per year (42.3 ZB per month) by 2019. That’s 49 times greater than the projected data center traffic for 2019 (10.4 ZB).
Cisco says that as of today, 73 per cent of data stored on client devices resides on PCs, but over the course of next four years, the majority of stored data (51 per cent) will move to non-PC devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, M2M modules, et al.).
This transition to mobile devices will eventually result in a greater demand and use for consumer cloud storage. By 2019, 55 per cent of the residential Internet population will use personal cloud storage (up from 42 per cent in 2014).
Cloud traffic, a subset of data center traffic, is generated by cloud services accessible through the Internet from scalable, virtualized cloud data centers, whereas total data center traffic is comprised of all traffic traversing within and between data centers as well as to end users. Annual global data center IP traffic is projected to reach 10.4 ZB by the end of 2019, up from 3.4 ZB per year in 2014.
