The fifth annual Cisco Global Cloud Index (2014-2019) is out. What it has forecast is that global Cloud traffic would more than quadruple by the end of 2019, from 2.1 to 8.6 zettabytes (ZB), outpacing the growth of total global data centre traffic, which is forecast to triple during the same time frame (from 3.4 to 10.4 ZB).
So what will be driving this traffic?
- Transition to Cloud services, including the personal Cloud demands of an increasing number of mobile devices
- Rapid growth in popularity of public Cloud services for business
- Increased degree of virtualization in private Clouds
- Growth of machine-to-machine (M2M) connections also had the potential to drive more Cloud traffic in the future
“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 organisations 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.”
In addition to the rapid growth of Cloud traffic, Cisco has also predicted that the Internet of Everything (IoE) — the connection of people, processes, data and things — could have a significant impact on data center and Cloud traffic growth.
A broad range of IoE applications were generating large volumes of data that could reach 507.5 ZB per year (42.3 ZB per month) by 2019. That was 49 times greater than the projected data centre traffic for 2019 (10.4 ZB). Today, only a small portion of this Content was stored in data centres, but that could change as the application demand and use of Big Data analytics evolved.
Today, 73 percent of data stored on client devices resided on PCs. By 2019, the majority of stored data (51 percent) would move to non-PC devices (e.g., smartphones, Tablets, M2M modules, among others). With the volume of stored data increasing, Cisco has predicted a greater demand and use for consumer Cloud storage.
Further, by 2019, 55 percent of the residential Internet population will be using personal Cloud storage (up from 42 percent in 2014).
Global Cloud Index Forecasted Highlights and Projections with Unit Measurement:
1. Global Data Center and Cloud Traffic:
- Annual global data center IP traffic was projected to reach 10.4 ZB by the end of 2019, up from 3.4 ZB per year in 2014.
- Annual global Cloud traffic was projected to quadruple, reaching 8.6 ZB (719 EB per month) by the end of 2019, up from 2.1 ZB per year (176 EB per month) in 2014, and was expected to account for more than four-fifths (83 percent) of total data center traffic by 2019.
By region, 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 region, North America will also have the highest data center traffic volume (4.5 ZB) by 2019; followed by Asia Pacific (2.7 ZB) and Western Europe (1.8 ZB).
To help put things in perspective, 10.4 ZB was equivalent to:
- 144 trillion hours of streaming music
- Equivalent to about 26 months of continuous music streaming for the world’s population* in 2019
- 26 trillion hours of business Web conferencing with a Webcam
- Equivalent to about 21 hours of daily Web conferencing for the world’s workforce in 2019
6.8 trillion hours of high-definition (HD) movies viewed Online - Equivalent to about 2.4 hours of daily streamed HD movies for the world’s population in 2019
- 1.2 trillion hours of ultra-high definition (UHD) video streaming
2.Consumer Cloud Storage:
- By 2019, 55 percent (more than 2 billion users) of the consumer Internet population would use personal Cloud storage, up from 42 percent (1.1 billion users) in 2014.
- Globally, consumer Cloud storage traffic per user would be 1.6 gigabytes per month by 2019, compared to 992 megabytes per month in 2014.
- In 2014, 73 percent of data stored on client devices resided on PCs. By 2019, the majority of stored data (51 percent) will move to non-PC devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, M2M modules, et al.).
3. Data center virtualization:
Overall data center workloads will more than double from 2014 to 2019; however, Cloud workloads will more than triple over the same period, the report said.
The workload density (that is, workloads per physical server) for cloud data centers was 5.1 in 2014 and will grow to 8.4 by 2019. Comparatively, for traditional data centers, workload density was 2.0 in 2014 and will grow to 3.2 by 2019.
4. IoE-Generated data:
Globally, the data created by IoE connections would reach 507.5 zettabytes per year (42.3 zettabytes per month) by 2019, up from 134.5 zettabytes per year (11.2 ZB per month) in 2014. A smart city of 1 million would generate 180 million gigabytes of data per day by 2019.
The Cisco Global Cloud Index (2014-2019) was developed to estimate global data centre and Cloud-based traffic growth and trends.
Image Credit: Cisco