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The amount of traffic being transferred to and from cloud computing solutions is set to rise nearly four-fold over the next few years, accounting for 92 per cent of all data centre traffic by 2020.
A recent report by Cisco estimates that increased migration to cloud architectures will result in the volume of traffic growing from 3.9 zettabytes per year in 2015 to 14.1 zettabytes per year in 2020. The company attributed much of this demand to the cloud's ability to scale more quickly and support more workloads than traditional data centres.
Doug Webster, vice-president of service provider marketing at Cisco, noted that in the six years since the company began studying data centre activity, cloud computing has grown from being a niche, emerging technology to one that is an essential component of enterprise architecture for businesses and service providers around the world.
"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," he continued.
The report highlighted several key drivers of data centre traffic in the coming years, including high-bandwidth solutions such as video - which will make up more than a third (34 per cent) of consumer workloads by 2020 - and Internet of Things (IoT) solutions.
In terms of the share of overall workloads, IoT, analytics and database activities will be the fastest-growing area of traffic, with these technologies accounting for nearly a quarter (22 per cent) of traffic by the end of the forecast period.
IoT will also be a huge generator of data, although only a small percentage of this will be stored. Cisco forecast that by 2020, the amount of data created by these technologies will reach 600 zettabytes, 275 times higher than the projected traffic created by end user devices and 39 times higher than total projected data centre traffic.
When it comes to stored data, the growth in use of big data solutions will be a key driver, with this volume set to reach 247 exabytes by 2020. This will be a tenfold increase from the 25 exabytes stored in 2015. Big data alone will therefore make up 27 per cent of total data stored in data centres, up from 15 per cent in 2015.
Cisco also noted that as global networking technology continues to improve, this will lead to greater use of cloud computing solutions, as users are able to take advantage of the benefits of the technology without having to worry about issues such as latency and poor upload/download speeds.
The company highlighted the role that software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualisation (NFV) are playing in improving data centre architectures and streamlining traffic flows, particularly in large 'hyperscale' data centres, which are expected to support over half of traffic (53 per cent) by 2020.
"Over the next five years, nearly 60 per cent of global hyperscale data centres are expected to deploy SDN/NFV solutions," Cisco stated. "By 2020, 44 per cent of traffic within data centres will be supported by SDN/NFV platforms (up from 23 per cent in 2015) as operators strive for greater efficiencies."
