Cloud traffic is expected to rise 3.7-fold to 14.1 ZB per year by 2020 from 3.9 ZB per year in 2015, according to a study by Cisco.
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.