The Cisco Global Cloud Index (2016-2021) said cloud data center traffic will reach 19.5 zettabytes (ZB) per year by 2021 against 6.0 ZB per year in 2016 — driven by surging cloud applications.
The Cisco report said cloud data center traffic will achieve 3.3-fold growth or 27 percent CAGR from 2016 to 2021. Globally, cloud data center traffic will represent 95 percent of total data center traffic by 2021 against 88 percent in 2016.
Improvements in data center governance and data control have minimized enterprise risk and protected consumer information. Security innovations and cloud computing benefits, including scalability and economies of scale, play key roles in fueling the cloud growth.
Cisco expects IoT connections to reach 13.7 billion by 2021 against 5.8 billion in 2016.
The number of hyperscale data centers will be 628 from 338 in 2016, 1.9-fold growth or near doubling over the forecast period.
Hyperscale data centers will support:
53 percent of data center servers by 2021 against 27 percent in 2016
69 percent of data center processing power by 2021 against 41 percent in 2016
65 percent of data stored in data centers by 2021 against 51 percent in 2016
55 percent of data center traffic by 2021 against 39 percent in 2016
“Data center application growth is clearly exploding in this new multicloud world. This projected growth will require new innovations especially in the areas of public, private and hybrid clouds,” said Kip Compton, vice president of Cisco’s Cloud Platform and Solutions Group.
Cloud data centers will be processing 94 percent of workloads and compute instances by 2021 and traditional data centers will process 6 percent.
Overall data center workloads and compute instances will more than double (2.3-fold) from 2016 to 2021. Cloud workloads and compute instances will nearly triple (2.7-fold) over the same period.
The workload and compute instance density for cloud data centers will grow to 13.2 by 2021 from 8.8 in 2016. Workload and compute instance density traditional data centers will grow to 3.8 by 2021 from 2.4 in 2016.
Data stored in data centers will nearly quintuple by 2021 to 1.3 ZB by 2021 against 4.6-fold (a CAGR of 36 percent) from 286 EB in 2016.
Big data will reach 403 exabytes (EB) by 2021, up almost 8-fold from 25 EB in 2016. Big data will represent 30 percent of data stored in data centers by 2021, up from 18 percent in 2016.
The amount of data stored on devices will be 4.5 times higher than data stored in data centers, at 5.9 ZB by 2021.
Data created (and not necessarily stored) by any device — driven largely by IoT — will reach 847 ZB per year by 2021 against 218 ZB per year in 2016.
Big data will account for 20 percent (2.5 ZB annual, 209 EB monthly) of traffic within data centers by 2021 against 12 percent (593 EB annual, 49 EB monthly) in 2016.
Video streaming will account for 10 percent of traffic within data centers by 2021 against 9 percent in 2016.
Video will account for 85 percent of traffic from data centers to end users by 2021 against 78 percent in 2016.
Search will account for 20 percent of traffic within data centers by 2021, compared to 28 percent in 2016.
Social networking will account for 22 percent of traffic within data centers by 2021 against 20 percent in 2016.
75 percent (402 million) of the total cloud workloads and compute instances will be SaaS workloads and compute instances by 2021 against 71 percent (141 million) in 2016.
16 percent (85 million) of the total cloud workloads and compute instances will be IaaS workloads and compute instances by 2021 against 21 percent (42 million) in 2016.
9 percent (46 million) of the total cloud workloads and compute instances will be PaaS workloads and compute instances by 2021 against 8 percent (16 million) in 2016.
