Cisco says cloud traffic to triple by 2019

Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO)'s 2015 Global Cloud Index (GCI) has predicted that global cloud traffic will increase from 2.1 to 8.6 zettabytes a year by 2019, while datacentre traffic will increase to 10.4 zettabytes a year.

The company said the reason for this acceleration of cloud services is the move by businesses to embrace public cloud services and increasing trend for virtualisation in private clouds.

By 2019, more than half of data will operate out of public cloud environments, compared to under a third today and private datacentre usage will decrease by almost 40 per cent.

Cisco thinks overall virtualised data centre workloads will more than double from 2014 to 2019, but cloud workloads will treble.

An additional factor is the growth of mobile devices and the Internet of Everything (IoE). Today, 73 per cent of data is stored on PCs, but by 2019, Cisco predicts 51 percent will be moved to non-PC-based devices such as mobiles, tablets and M2M modules.

The data created by IoE devices will soar to 507.5 zettabytes per year by 2019, up from 134.5 zettabytes per year in 2014 and the introduction of smart cities will contribute 180m gigabytes of data per day, per location.

“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,” says Doug Webster, vice president of service provider marketing at 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.”