Cloud Data Traffic to Rise to 14.1ZB by 2020, Says Cisco Report

Cloud data traffic is expected to rise 3.7 fold - up from 3.9 zettabytes (ZB) per year in 2015 - to 14.1ZB per year by 2020, a new report by global networking giant Cisco revealed on Friday.

According to the sixth annual Cisco Global Cloud Index 2015-2020 report, the rapid growth of cloud traffic is attributed to the increased data migration to cloud architectures owing to their ability to scale quickly and efficiently support more workloads than traditional data centres.

Business workloads will grow by 2.4-fold from 2015 to 2020 but their overall share of data centre workloads will decrease from 79 to 72 percent and during the same time, consumer workloads will grow by 3.5-fold.

"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, Service Provider Marketing, Cisco, in a statement.

By 2020, database/analytics/Internet of Things (IoT) workloads will account for 22 percent of total business workloads, compared to 20 percent in 2015.

By 2020, 68 percent of the Cloud workloads will be in public Cloud data centres, up from 49 percent in 2015, the findings showed. Fifty-nine percent of the consumer Internet population will use personal Cloud storage, up from 47 percent in 2015.

Video streaming workloads will account for 34 percent of total consumer workloads by 2020, compared to 29 percent in 2015. The amount of data stored on devices will be five times higher than data stored in data centres by 2020, the report added.