Cisco: 95% of all data centre traffic by 2021 will come from cloud

Cisco‘s latest report shows that the rapid growth of cloud applications will lead to an explosion of data center traffic: It is estimated that by 2021, the global cloud data center traffic will increase from 6 ZBs in 2016 to 19.5 ZBs in 2021. The report also found that by 2021, cloud computing will account for 95% of all data center traffic, compared with 88% in 2016.

The report notes that while security issues in the past have deterred some companies from adopting cloud computing, improvements in data center governance and data control can help minimize corporate risk and better protect customer information.

By Sam Johnston [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

The development of the Internet of Things (IoT) applications, including smart cars and related utilities, also requires scalable compute and storage solutions to accommodate the ever-expanding data center needs. Cisco predicts that by 2021, the global number of IoT connections is expected to reach 13.7 billion, up from 5.8 billion in 2015.

The growing demand for data centers and cloud resources will result in a doubling of the number of very large data centers by 2021 (from 338 in 2016 to 628 in 2021). Three years later, very large data centers will support 53% of all data center servers and 69% of all data center capacity.

Kip Compton, Cisco cloud platform group vice president, said at a news conference: “Data center applications are clearly growing rapidly, requiring new innovations, especially in the public, private, and hybrid cloud areas.”

Demand for data centers will only increase: By 2021, 94% of workloads and compute instances will be handled by cloud data centers and 6% by traditional data centers. By 2021, data stored in the data center will grow fivefold, from 286 EB in 2016 to 1.3 ZB in 2021.

The growth of storage data is mainly driven by big data and the Internet of Things. Three years later, big data will account for 20% of data center traffic, up from 12% in 2016.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) will continue to dominate the growth of cloud services: By 2021, 75 percent of cloud computing workload and computing instances will take the SaaS model, up from 71 percent in 2016. At the same time, 16% of workloads are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and 9% are PaaS.

Source: cloudpro