The shift to the cloud is accelerating, with the traffic routed through cloud-based data centers expected to quadruple in the next four years, according to the results of the sixth annual Global Cloud Index published by Cisco.

The company estimated that this type of traffic will reach 14.1 Zettabytes by 2020, while on-premise data centers will be responsible for just 1.3 ZB.

The report also noted that public cloud is growing faster than private cloud, and consumer workloads, while smaller in number, are growing faster than enterprise workloads.

All about the cloud
– Cisco

Zettabyte era

In the latest edition of the Global Cloud Index, Cisco collected data from organizations like Gartner, IDC, Juniper Research, Ovum, Synergy, ITU, and the United Nations, and combined it with its own networking metrics. According to the results, an estimated 68 percent of cloud workloads will be deployed in public cloud data centers by 2020, up from 49 percent in 2015.

Authors attribute the popularity of cloud architectures to their ability to scale quickly, and efficiently support more workloads than traditional data centers.

In the same period, overall data center storage capacity is expected to grow nearly fivefold, from 382 Exabytes to 1.8 Zettabytes. However, this will be dwarfed by the amount of data stored on end—user devices by 2020, totaling 5.3 ZB.

A lot of the growth in cloud will be supported by hyperscale data centers – the largest server farms maintained by the likes of Microsoft, Amazon and Google. The number of such facilities is expected to reach 485 in the next four years, up from 259 in 2015.

According to Cisco, hyperscale data centers will account for 47 percent of global server fleet and support 53 percent of all data center traffic by 2020. Researchers added that over the next five years, nearly 60 percent of hyperscale facilities are expected to deploy SDN and/or NFV solutions.

“In the six years of this study, cloud computing has advanced from an emerging technology to an essential scalable and flexible part of architecture for service providers of all types around the globe,” said Doug Webster, vice president of Service Provider Marketing at Cisco.

“Powered by video, IoT, SDN/NFV and more, 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.”