Global cloud traffic is expected to quadruple at a combined annual growth rate (CAGR) of 35% to 5.3 zettabytes by 2017, according to the third annual Cisco Global Cloud Index (2012 – 2017) report.
The report revealed that overall global data centre traffic would rise threefold and reach a 7.7 zettabytes per year by 2017.
According to Cisco, about 17% of data centre traffic will be driven by end users accessing clouds for web surfing, video streaming, collaboration and connected devices, adding to the Internet of Everything.
Cisco Product and Solutions Marketing SVP Doug Merritt said that people around the world continue demanding to access personal, business and entertainment content anywhere on any device.
"Because of this continuing trend, we are seeing huge increases in the amount of cloud traffic within, between and beyond data centres over the next four years," Merritt said.
The report said the remaining data centre traffic is not fuelled directly by end users, but by the data centres and cloud-computing workloads deployed in activities that are virtually invisible to individuals.
The report said it expects that 7% of data centre traffic will be generated between data centres, mainly fuelled by data replication and software system updates by 2017.
However, a further 76% of the data centre traffic would stay within the data centre and will be highly generated by storage, production and development data in a virtualised environment.
Regionally, the Middle East and Africa are expected to have the highest cloud traffic growth rate with 57%, followed by Asia Pacific (43%) and Central and Eastern Europe (36%).
