Cisco: Cloud data centre traffic to grow by 440% by 2020

The recently released sixth annual Cisco Global Cloud Index (2015-2020) reveals that global cloud traffic is expected to rise 3.7-fold, up from 3.9 zettabytes (ZB) per year in 2015 to 14.1 ZB per year by 2020.

In Middle East and Africa, it is expected that data centre traffic will reach 451 exabytes per year by 2020, up from 105 exabytes per year in 2015. This rapid growth of cloud traffic is attributed to increased migration to cloud architectures and their ability to scale quickly and efficiently support more workloads than traditional data centres.

With greater data centre virtualisation, cloud operators are also able to achieve greater operational efficiencies while flexibly delivering a growing variety of services to businesses and consumers with optimal performance.

To better understand data center growth, new analysis on application workloads was developed for this year’s report.

According to the report, business workloads will grow by 2.4 fold from 2015 to 2020 but their overall share of data centre workloads will decrease from 79 to 72 percent.

It also revealed that consumer workloads, while smaller in number, are growing faster. By 2020, consumer workloads will account for 28 percent (134.3 million) of total data center workloads, compared to 21 percent (38.6 million) in 2015. Video streaming workloads will account for 34 percent of total consumer workloads by 2020 compared to 29 percent in 2015. Lastly, social networking workloads will account for 24 percent of total consumer workloads.
The index also showed that IoT/analytics/database workloads are growing the most in terms of share of business workloads with collaboration and compute workloads largely maintaining their share.

Furthermore, it highlighted that video and social networking will lead the increase in consumer workloads, each respectively grows their percentage significantly. By 2020, video streaming workloads will account for 34 percent of total consumer workloads; social networking workloads will account for 24 percent of total consumer workloads, compared to 20 percent in 2015; search workloads will account for 15 percent of total consumer workloads, compared to 17 percent in 2015.

“Over the past year, we’ve seen a variety of businesses and organizations develop plans for cloud migration or adoption. The move to the cloud is imminent as cloud computing has advanced from an emerging technology to an essential scalable and flexible networking solution,” said Mike Weston, Vice President, Middle East, Cisco. “With multiple trends influencing the growth of data center and cloud computing such as increasing digitisation, the widespread adoption of multiple devices and connections and the growth of mobility, the importance of cloud readiness cannot be overemphasized.”

“Although our region has made significant strides to reach a capable level of supporting basic and intermediate cloud services, the focus now turns to continuing to improve network capabilities to support the advanced cloud applications that organizations and end users expect and rely upon,” added Weston.