Cisco Forecasts Traffic in the Cloud Will Only Get Busier

From 2014 to 2019, global data center traffic will almost triple, and cloud traffic is becoming an increasingly larger part of that, more than quadrupling, Cisco predicts.

According to Cisco’s numbers, global data center traffic will grow from 3.4 zettabytes last year to 10.4ZB by 2019. During that same time, worldwide cloud traffic will quadruple, from 2.1ZB to 8.6ZB, due in large part to growing demand for personal clouds as the number of mobile devices increases, growing public cloud services for business and the rise of virtualization in private clouds.

It’s equal to 144 trillion hours of streaming music (26 months of continuous music streaming for the world’s population in 2019), 26 trillion hours of business Web conferencing with a webcam (21 hours of daily Web conferencing for the global workforce in 2019), or 6.8 trillion HD movies viewed online (2.4 hours of daily streamed HD moves for the world’s population n 2019).

By 2019, North America will have the highest volume of cloud traffic, at 3.6ZB, followed by the Asia-Pacific region (2.3ZB) and Western Europe (1.5ZB). The same holds true in data center traffic: North America will lead with 4.5ZB, with the Asia-Pacific next, at 3.7ZB, and Western Europe, at 1.8ZB.

Last year, 42 percent of Internet consumers (1.1 billion users) used personal storage; that will grow to 55 percent (more than 2 billion users) by 2019. Consumer cloud storage traffic per user will be 1.6 gigabytes a month by 2019, compared with 992 megabytes per month in 2014.

Seventy-three percent of data stored on client devices lived on PCs, according to Cisco. By 2019, 51 percent of stored data will move to non-PC devices, such as smartphones, tablets and machine-to-machine (M2M) modules.

Worldwide, the data created by IoE connections (IoE is essentially Cisco’s term for the Internet of things, or IoT) will hit 507.5ZB per year—or 42.3ZB a month. That compares with 134.5ZB a year, or 11.2ZB a month, in 2014. A smart city of 1 million will create 180 million GB of data a day by 2019.

Overall data center workloads will more than double from 2014 to 2019, while cloud workloads will more than triple. In addition, workload density—workloads per physical server—in traditional data centers will increase from 2 in 2014 to 3.2 in 2019, while in cloud data centers, it will jump from 5.1 last year to 8.4 by 2019.

Public cloud use is growing faster than private cloud use. Public cloud workloads will grow 44 percent a year from 2014 to 2019, while private cloud workloads will increase at 16 percent. The percentage of cloud workloads in public cloud data centers will jump from 30 percent last year to 56 percent in 2019, while the percentage in private clouds will drop from 70 to 44 percent.

By 2019, 59 percent of all cloud workloads will be software-as-a-service workloads. Thirty percent will be infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) workloads, while 11 percent will be platform-as-a-service (PaaS) workloads.

Cisco looks at the average and median upload/download speeds and latencies of fixed and mobile networks of more than 150 countries to gauge cloud readiness. The company found that in 2015, 81 countries met the single advanced application readiness criteria for mobile networks, up from 21 countries last year. In 2015, 119 countries met the criteria for fixed networks, an increase from 109 in 2014.