Cloud traffic (digital business backbone) to expand fourfold by 2019 - report

Several factors are driving cloud traffic’s accelerating growth and the transition to cloud services, including the personal cloud demands of an increasing number of mobile devices, the rapid growth in popularity of public cloud services for business and the increased degree of virtualization in private clouds which is increasing the density of those workloads, according to the fifth annual Cisco Global Cloud Index (2014-2019) issued by Cisco company. The growth of machine-to-machine (M2M) connections also has the potential to drive more cloud traffic in the future.

“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,” said Doug Webster, vice president of service provider marketing, Cisco.

“Enterprise and government organizations 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.”

In addition to the rapid growth of cloud traffic, Cisco predicts that the Internet of Everything (IoE)—the connection of people, processes, data and things—could have a significant impact on data center and cloud traffic growth. A broad range of IoE applications are generating large volumes of data that could reach 507.5 ZB per year (42.3 ZB per month) by 2019. That’s 49 times greater than the projected data center traffic for 2019 (10.4 ZB). Today, only a small portion of this content is stored in data centers, but that could change as the application demand and uses of big data analytics evolves (i.e., analysing collected data to make tactical and strategic decisions).

Today, 73% of data stored on client devices resides on PCs. By 2019, the majority of stored data (51%) will move to non-PC devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, M2M modules, et al.). With the volume of stored data increasing, Cisco predicts a greater demand and use for consumer cloud storage. By 2019, 55% of the residential Internet population will use personal cloud storage (up from 42% in 2014). As an example, the forecast estimates that by 2017, global smartphone traffic (201 EB per year) will exceed the amount of data stored (179 EB per year) on those devices – necessitating the need for greater storage capabilities via the cloud.

By 2019, 55% (more than 2 billion users) of the consumer internet population will use personal cloud storage up from 42% (1.1 billion users) in 2014. Globally, consumer cloud storage traffic per user will be 1.6 gigabytes per month by 2019, compared to 992 megabytes per month in 2014. In 2014, 73% of data stored on client devices resided on PCs. By 2019, the majority of stored data (51%) will move to non-PC devices, like martphones or tablets.

Public cloud, in which services are rendered over a network that is open for public use, is growing faster than private cloud, which includes cloud infrastructure operated for a single organisation, in terms of workloads. But, throughout the five-year forecast, private cloud will continue to outpace public cloud in its degree of virtualization.

With businesses increasingly assessing the cost associated with IT dedicated resources and demanding for more agility, public cloud adoption will rise. Public cloud workloads are going to grow at a 44% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) from 2014 to 2019 and private cloud workloads will grow at a slower pace (16% CAGR) from 2014 to 2019. By 2019, 56% of the cloud workloads will be in public cloud data centers, up from 30% in 2014.

SaaS will be the most popular and adopted service model for public and private cloud workloads, respectively, by 2019. By 2019, 59% of the total cloud workloads will be Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) workloads, up from 45% in 2014. By 2019, 30% of the total cloud workloads will be Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) workloads, down from 42% in 2014. By 2019, 11% of the total cloud workloads will be Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) workloads, down from 13% in 2014.

To assess cloud readiness, Cisco analyses the average and median upload/download speeds and latencies of fixed and mobile networks for more than 150 countries. For 2015, 81 countries met the single advanced application readiness criteria for mobile networks; a significant increase from last year’s 21 countries. This year, 119 countries, met the single advanced application criteria for fixed networks; up from 109 countries in 2014.

The Cisco® Global Cloud Index (2014-2019) was developed to estimate global data center and cloud-based traffic growth and trends. The report serves as a complementary resource to existing Internet Protocol (IP) network traffic studies such as the Cisco Visual Networking Index™, providing new insights and visibility into emerging trends affecting data centers and cloud architectures. The forecast becomes increasingly important as the network and data center become more intrinsically linked in offering cloud services.