Cloud Traffic Proliferating at Unprecedented Rate

According to a recent report by Cisco, worldwide data center traffic is predicted to grow fourfold, tipping 6.6 zettabytes annually by 2016. 

Global cloud traffic is currently the most rapidly expanding area of data center traffic and its future looks bright. Cisco’s latest statistics show that cloud traffic growth is predicted to increase six-fold by 2016. This means a boost from 683 exabytes of traffic in 2011 to 4.3 zettabytes by the end of 2016. Cisco also predicts that Africa and the Middle East will have the highest cloud traffic growth rate.

Just to put these numbers into context, Cisco says that 6.6 zettabytes is equivalent to:

• 92 trillion hours of streaming music – the equivalent to about 1.5 years of continuous music streaming for the world's population in 2016
  
  
• 16 trillion hours of business Web conferencing – the equivalent to about 12 hours of daily Web conferencing for the world's workforce in 2016
  
  
• Seven trillion hours of online high-definition (HD) video streaming – the equivalent to about 2.5 hours of daily streamed HD video for the world’s population in 2016

Cisco explained that most of the data center traffic is caused by data centers and workloads in the cloud rather than end users. 

According to Doug Merritt, senior vice president, Corporate Marketing, Cisco, the main factor behind this global trend is client’s increasing need to have access to business and personal content from any location on any device.

“When you couple this growth with projected increases in connected devices and objects, the next-generation Internet will be an essential component to enabling much greater data center virtualization and a new world of interconnected clouds,” Merritt explained.

Cisco also predicts that between 2011 and 2016, there will be a 5.3-fold increase in cloud workloads and a 2.5-fold increase in data center workloads. The company pinpoints 2014 as the year that most enterprises migrate their workloads to the cloud, leaving only 48 percent of workloads in the traditional IT space.

Also forecast for the same period is that storage, development data, and production will generate 76 percent of data center traffic, which will remain within the data center. A further 17 percent of this traffic will be accounted for by end users who are using clouds to stream video, send email and surf the Web. The remaining seven percent will mainly be utilized by software and system updates as well as data replication. (CU) Link