I recently read the inaugural Cisco Global Cloud Index, released in November 2011. It indicates that global data center traffic has already reached the zettabyte era, and cloud-based traffic will reach that milestone by 2014. (One zettabyte is equal to a sextillion bytes or a trillion gigabytes.)
There are some rather interesting facts in the report. Some notable projections and findings are listed below:
- Globally, cloud traffic will grow from just 11 percent of total data center traffic in 2010 to more than a third (34 percent) of total data center traffic by 2015.
- Global data center traffic is forecast to more than fourfold from 1.1 zettabytes in 2010 to 4.8 zettabytes annually in 2015, a 33 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2010 to 2015
- The transition to cloud services is driving global cloud traffic at a growth rate that is twice as fast as global data center traffic. Global cloud computing traffic will grow 12-fold from 130 exabytes in 2010 to 1.6 zettabytes annually by 2015, a 66 percent CAGR from 2010 to 2015
- 2014 is the first year where the balance of workloads shifts toward the cloud—51 percent of total workloads will be processed in a cloud environment versus 49 percent in the traditional IT space
- All regions included in the study—Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa, Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and North America—can support today's basic cloud-computing applications
Learn more from Cisco's Global Cloud Index.
