Cisco: Cloud Traffic to Nearly Quadruple by 2020

Cloud traffic is expected to rise 3.7-fold, up from 3.9 zettabytes (ZB) per year in 2015 to 14.1 ZB per year by 2020, according to the newly-released sixth annual Cisco Global Cloud Index (2015-2020).

“In the six years of this study, cloud computing has advanced from an emerging technology to an essential scalable and flexible part of architecture for service providers of all types around the globe,” said Doug Webster, Vice President of Service Provider Marketing, Cisco. “Powered by video, IoT, SDN/NFV and more, we forecast this significant cloud migration and the increased amount of network traffic generated as a result to continue at a rapid rate as operators streamline infrastructures to help them more profitably deliver IP-based services businesses and consumers alike.”

Some highlights:

• Business workloads will grow by 2.4 fold from 2015 to 2020 but their overall share of data center workloads will decrease from 79 to 72 percent.
• Consumer workloads, while smaller in number, are growing faster. During the same time, consumer workloads will grow faster by 3.5 fold.
• By 2020, consumer workloads will account for 28 percent (134.3 million) of total data center workloads, compared to 21 percent (38.6 million) in 2015.
• By 2020, database/analytics/Internet of Things (IoT) workloads will account for 22 percent of total business workloads, compared to 20 percent in 2015.
• Video and social networking will lead the increase in consumer workloads, each respectively grows their percentage significantly.
• By 2020: video streaming workloads will account for 34 percent of total consumer workloads, compared to 29 percent in 2015; social networking workloads will account for 24 percent of total consumer workloads, compared to 20 percent in 2015; search workloads will account for 15 percent of total consumer workloads, compared to 17 percent in 2015.
• Hyperscale data centers will grow from 259 in 2015 to 485 by 2020. 
• Hyperscale data center traffic is projected to quintuple over the next five years. These infrastructures will account for 47 percent of total data center installed servers and support 53 percent of all data center traffic by 2020.
• By 2020, cloud data center traffic will reach 14.1 ZB per year, up from 3.9 ZB per year in 2015. 
• By 2020, traditional data center traffic will reach 1.3 ZB per year, up from 827 exabytes (EB) per year in 2015.
• By 2020, 92 percent of workloads will be processed by cloud data centers; 8 percent will be processed by traditional data centers.
• Workload density (workloads per physical server) for cloud data centers was 7.3 in 2015 and will grow to 11.9 by 2020. Comparatively, for traditional data centers, workload density was 2.2 in 2015 and will grow modestly to 3.5 by 2020.
• By 2020, 68 percent (298 million) of the cloud workloads will be in public cloud data centers, up from 49 percent (66.3 million) in 2015 (35 percent CAGR 2015-2020).
• By 2020, 32 percent (142 million) of the cloud workloads will be in private cloud data centers, down from 51 percent (69.7 million) in 2015 (15 percent CAGR 2015-2020).
• By 2020, 59 percent (2.3 billion users) of the consumer Internet population will use personal cloud storage up from 47 percent (1.3 billion users) in 2015.
• By 2020, consumer cloud storage traffic per user will be 1.7 GB per month, compared to 513 MB per month in 2015.
• Data center storage capacity is increasing to accommodate the migration of consumer data from devices to the cloud.
• By 2020, data center storage installed capacity will grow to 1.8 ZB up from 382 EB in 2015, nearly a 5-fold growth.
• By 2020, the total global installed data storage capacity in cloud data centers will account for 88 percent share of total DC storage capacity up from 64.9 percent in 2015.
• 6. Big data will drive overall growth in stored data.
• Globally, the data stored in data centers will quintuple by 2020 to reach 915 EB by 2020, up 5.3-fold (a CAGR of 40 percent) from 171 EB in 2015.
• Big data will reach 247 EB by 2020, up almost 10-fold from 25 EB in 2015. Big data alone will represent 27 percent of data stored in data centers by 2020, up from 15 percent in 2015.

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