Cisco Predicts 8.6 Zettabytes Worth of Cloud Traffic by 2020
Cisco is one of the premier public cloud vendors for public cloud data centers all around the world. Cisco’s networking platform has become the gold standard that IT professionals use when building out additional infrastructure.
Cisco recently released a report called its Cloud Index which breaks down several different data points concerning the future of the internet.
Cisco also specifically talks about IoT and its segmentation in terms of bandwidth use. In Cisco’s Cloud Index, the report predicts total global cloud traffic consumption to be 8.6 zettabytes by the beginning of 2020.
To clarify, 1 zettabyte (ZB) is the equivalent of 1 billion terabytes. You could store hundreds of trillions of MP3 files in 1 ZB.
Cisco says that data generated by IoT devices will hit over 500 ZBs by the end of 2019. This number takes into account the action performed by the IoT device, in which the device sends the data it generates into cloud storage.
Not only will bandwidth rates continue to increase, Cisco predicts that storage for the data generated by IoT devices will become a popular way for industries to gain actionable data in which they can use to streamline operations.
The report publishes several bullet points which give a glimpse of the future of the internet. Some of the points that stuck out are:
- Global IP Traffic will nearly triple between 2014 and 2019. In 2014, over 3.4ZBs were transferred over the internet. In 2019, Cisco predicts 10.4 ZBs to be transferred online.
- North America will continue outpace Asia and Europe in global cloud traffic.
- Cisco predicts that the bulk of consumer data will be stored in cloud services.
- 55% of end users will utilize cloud storage of some sort.
- Over 59% of workloads in the cloud will be SaaS products by 2019.
- PaaS will represent 11% of the global cloud traffic by 2019.
