Cloud traffic to nearly quadruple by 2020

This rapid growth of cloud traffic is attributed to increased migration to cloud architectures due to their ability to scale quickly and efficiently support more workloads than traditional data centres.

For the first time, Cisco also quantified and analysed the impact of hyperscale data centres. These data centres will grow to 485 by 2020 from 259 in 2015. Hyperscale data centre traffic is projected to quintuple over the next five years. These infrastructures will account for 47 percent of total data centre installed servers and support 53 percent of all data centre traffic by 2020.

A key infrastructure trend is transforming hyperscale (and other) data centres. Software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) are helping to flatten data centre architectures and streamline traffic flows. Over the next five years, nearly 60 percent of global hyperscale data centres are expected to deploy SDN/NFV products. By 2020, 44 percent of traffic within data centres will be supported by SDN/NFV platforms (up from 23 percent in 2015) as operators strive for greater efficiencies.