It appears nothing will slow the current explosive growth of the cloud down-- the Cisco Cloud Index (2014-2019) forecasts global cloud traffic will quadruple from 2.1 to 8.6 zettabytes (ZB) by end 2019.
Such growth outpaces total global datacentre traffic forecast to grow by 300% during the same period from 3.4 to 10.4ZB-- the equivalent of 26 trillion hours of business web conferencing or 6.8 trillion hours of HD video streaming.
W. Europe is 3rd in the global cloud traffic volume rankings, with traffic reaching 1.5ZB. On top are N. America (3.6ZB) and Asia Pacific (2.3ZB). The same goes for global datacentre traffic, as W. Europe is likewise 3rd (1.8ZB) as preceded by N. America (4.5TB) and Asia Pacific (2.7ZB).
What drives cloud traffic growth? Cisco points out the cloud demands of an increasing number of mobile devices, the growing popularity of enterprise public cloud services and the increase of virtualisation in private cloud. Machine-to-machine (M2) connection growth are another potential cloud traffic driver.
Meanwhile the Internet of Things (IoT) is forecast to generate up to 507.5ZB of data per year (or 42.3ZB monthly) by 2019. Currently only a small portion of such data is stored in datacentres, but application demand and improved big data analytics could change the situation.
In addition, Cisco predicts 55% of the residential internet population will use cloud storage in 2019, up from 42% in 2014, in part driven by smartphone users struggling with limited on-device storage.
The Global Cloud Index also involves an assessment of the average and median upload/download speeds and latencies of fixed and mobile networks in over 150 countries-- with 81 clountries meeting the "single advanced application readiness criteria" for mobile networks, a significant increase over 21 countries. 119 countries (up from 109) meet the advanced criteria for fixed networks.
The advanced network criteria demand download speeds reaching over 2500kbps, upload speeds higher than 1000kbps and 159-100 ms latency.
"The Global Cloud Index highlights the fact that cloud is moving well beyond a regional trend to becoming a mainstream solution globally, with cloud traffic expected to grow more than 30% in every worldwide region over the next five years," the company says. "Enterprise and government organizations are moving from test cloud environments to trusting clouds with their mission-critical workloads. At the same time, consumers continue to expect on-demand, anytime access to their content and services nearly everywhere. This creates a tremendous opportunity for cloud operators, which will play an increasingly relevant role in the communications industry ecosystem."
