There’s a lot to cheer for cloud companies, as the rate of global cloud traffic is likely to see a big surge within the next few years. According to Cisco’s Global Cloud Index Report, cloud traffic is all set to quadruple by 2020, representing a whopping 92 percent increase in total data center traffic. Over the next four years, cloud traffic is expected to rise 3.7 fold, up from 3.9 zettabytes (ZB) per year in 2015 to almost 14.1 ZB by 2020.
Region wise, the Middle East and Africa region will see the maximum increase, as the CAGR for this region is expected to be 34 percent. These high numbers are mainly because this region has the lowest number of data centers in 2015 at about 105 exabytes, and this is expected to increase to 451 exabytes. The second fastest growing region is North America, with a CAGR of 27 percent. The numbers here are expected to increase from 2.2 ZB to 7.1 ZB over the next four years.
This phenomenal growth rate can be attributed to many factors. Firstly, more companies world over are moving to cloud architecture because of the obvious benefits that come from it, such as scalability and flexibility. Cloud architecture allows companies to scale up or down quickly and efficiently, and at the same time, they can support more workloads when compared to traditional data centers.
Secondly, cloud providers are able to achieve greater levels of efficiency than before, due to advancements in technology, and the emergence of greater data center virtualization choices. This report brings out this connection between efficiency and increased workloads. It states that business workloads will increase 2.4 times between now and 2020, but the workload on data centers will go down from 79 percent to 72 percent. These numbers go to show how cloud providers are expected to improve their efficiency to reduce workload on their data centers.
Thirdly, the use of data centers has increased among non-business entities too. Large amounts of consumer data, powered by social media, is also handled by these data centers. In addition, data centers have also become hubs for delivery of content such as Netflix. Fourthly, the emergence of technologies like machine-to-machine learning, and Internet of Things (IoT) are expected to generate tons of data, that will be stored and analyzed in data centers. All these factors are expected to contribute to the surge in cloud traffic by 2020.
To make the most of this increase, Cisco has released a new product in the storage optimized server category. Known as the Unified Computing System (UCS) S-Series, this server has the capability to handle data-intensive workloads like big data, unstructured objects, and more. This product is expected to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) by almost 50 percent when compared to cloud.
Cloud providers, including top players such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, are also expected to widen their offerings to make the most of this surge in cloud traffic. In all, the future is sure to be a cloud-driven one.
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