07 March 2018

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Driven by surging cloud applications, Cisco forecasts that global data centre traffic will reach 19.5ZB per year by 2021, up from 6.0ZB per year in 2016.

In the seventh edition of its annual Global Cloud Index (GCI) released in early February, the company predicts that over the next three years, 94 per cent of workloads and compute instances will be processed by cloud data centres while six per cent will be processed by traditional ones.

It adds that globally, the data stored in data centres will nearly quintuple by 2021 to reach 1.3ZB by 2021, up from 286EB in 2016. Big Data will represent 30 per cent of the stored data stored, a rise from 18 per cent in 2016.

For business users, the GCI forecasts that ERP, collaboration, analytics, and other digital enterprise applications will represent the leading growth areas.

More specifically in the UK, it is predicted that business IP traffic will grow three-fold to reach 1.5EB per month in 2021. Cisco says that’s the equivalent of 379 million DVDs per month or 519,123 DVDs per hour.

The company goes on to forecast that business internet traffic in the UK will reach 1.3EB per month in 2021, up from 484PB per month in 2016. It adds that six per cent of enterprise internet traffic was mobile in 2016 and will grow to 10 per cent in 2021 to reach 134PB per month.

Business IP WAN traffic in the UK is expected to grow two-fold, rising from 119PB per month in 2016 to 198PB in 2021. Cisco says business IP WAN traffic was three per cent of total IP traffic in 2016 and will fall to two per cent in 2021.