.According to the report, consumer and business applications are contributing to the growing dominance of cloud services over the internet.
Commenting on the findings, Kip Compton, vice president of Cisco's cloud platform and solutions group, said: “Data centre application growth is clearly exploding in this new multi-cloud world. This projected growth will require new innovations especially in the areas of public, private and hybrid clouds.”
The report found that video streaming, social networking and Internet search are the most popular applications for consumers. For businesses, enterprise resource planning (ERP), collaboration, analytics and other digital enterprise applications are the most popular.
The biggest takeaway from the report is the prediction that global cloud data centre traffic will represent 95% of all data centre traffic by the year 2021. A figure that was only 88% in 2016. In addition the report suggests that global cloud data centre traffic will reach 19.5 ZB per year by 2021, up from 6.0 ZB per year in 2016.
Where there was once concerns over security over the adoption of cloud, the study says that due to Improvements in data centre governance and data control, the risks to enterprises using the cloud has been minimised. Advancements in security coupled with the benefits of cloud computing such as scalability and economies of scale have all been drivers in the growth of the cloud, as indicated in the report. In addition, with the growth of IoT applications such as the smart cars, smart cities, connected health and digital utilities, all require scalable computing and storage solutions to meet the growing data centre demands. The report indicates that IoT connections will reach 13.7 billion, up from 5.8 billion in 2016.
Another key finding from the report, states that by 2021 there will be approximately 628 hyperscale data centres worldwide, up from only 338 in 2016. Additionally, these new hyperscale facilities will support: 53% of all data centre servers up from 27% in 2016, 69% of all data centre processing power up from 41% in 2016, 69% of all data centre processing power up from 41% in 2016 and 55% of all data centre traffic up from 39% in 2016.
Other figures contained in the study, say that by 2021:
- 94% of workloads and compute instances will be processed by cloud data centres, the remaining 6% will be processed by traditional data centres.
- Globally, the data stored in data centres will nearly quintuple to reach 1.3 ZB.
- The amount of data stored on devices will be 4.5 times higher than data stored in data centres, at 5.9 ZB.
- Big data will account for 20% of traffic within data centres, compared to 12% in 2016.
- Video streaming will account for 10% of traffic within data centres, compared to 9% in 2016.
- Video will account for 85% of traffic from data centres to end users, compared to 78% in 2016.
- Search will account for 20% of traffic within data centres, compared to 28% in 2016.
- Social networking will account for 22% of traffic within data centres, compared to 20% in 2016.
- As for SaaS, 75% of the total cloud workloads and compute instances will be SaaS workloads and compute instances, up from 71% in 2016.
- 16% of the total cloud workloads and compute instances will be IaaS workloads and compute instances, down from 21% in 2016.
- 9% of the total cloud workloads and compute instances will be PaaS workloads and compute instances, which is up from 8% in 2016.
In December, Cisco partnered with the Zain Group to extend the latter's IP/MPLS network with the latest Cisco technologies. The news sets up the network for future opportunities and new business models, as well as allowing Zain’s network, which serves 45 million customers across the Middle East and North Africa, to meet the ever increasing demands of devices and growing connections.
