Cisco Says Cloud Traffic To Quadruple By 2019, Driven By Consumers, Mobility and IoT

  Forbes Magazine Oct 28, 2015 @ 08:07 AM

The just-released Cisco Cloud Index computes the rapid expansion of today’s stampede to the cloud. “We have never seen anything like this in terms of speed of customer adoption,” Oracle ORCL +2.56% Co-CEO Mark Hurd said earlier this week, describing how his corporate customers have enthusiastically embraced the cloud.

One of them, General Electric GE +0.00%, has moved, in just the last 18 months, 10% more of its computing load into the cloud, and expects to run 70% of its applications in the cloud by 2020. Last week, Amazon reported that its cloud business has surged 79% year-over-year and Microsoft MSFT +0.00% announced that its cloud business has “more than doubled.”

Here are the highlights of Cisco’s ongoing study of the growth of global data center and cloud-based data traffic.

Almost all of the work of IT will be done in cloud data centers

Based on its hands-on knowledge of the movement of data over global computer networks, Cisco predicts that cloud traffic will grow at an annual rate of 33% over the next 5 years , quadrupling from 2.1 zettabytes (2.1 trillion gigabytes) in 2014 to 8.6 zettabytes by the end of 2019. 86% of workloads will be processed by cloud data centers in 2019  and only 14% will be processed by traditional data centers.

Cloud traffic is expected to account for 83% of total data center traffic by 2019. Cloud traffic is a subset of data center traffic and is generated by cloud services accessible through the Internet from scalable, virtualized cloud data centers. Total data center traffic, which Cisco projects will reach 10.4 zettabytes by the end of 2019, is comprised of all traffic traversing within and between data centers as well as to end users.

10.4 trillion gigabytes is the equivalent of 144 trillion hours of streaming music or 6.8 trillion of high-definition (HD) movies viewed online. Ones and zeros are eating the world and the companies providing consumers with digital entertainment and other services have been at the forefront of the migration to the cloud.  Indeed, The Wall Street Journal has reported recently that Netflix has shut down the last of its data centers, moving the last piece of its IT infrastructure to the public cloud.

The total volume of stored data on client devices and in data centers will more than double to reach 3.5 zettabytes by 2019. Most stored data resides in client devices today and will continue to do so over the next 5 years, but more data will move to the data center over time, representing 18% of all data in 2019, up from 12% in 2014.

In addition to larger volumes of stored data, the stored data will be coming from a wider range of devices by 2019. Currently, 73% of data stored on client devices resides on PCs. By 2019, stored data on PCs will go down to 49%, with a greater portion of data on smartphones, tablets, and machine-to-machine (M2M) modules. Stored data associated with M2M will grow at a faster rate than any other device category at an 89% CAGR.