Cisco foresees MEA cloud traffic to grow 440% by 2020

Cisco revealed that cloud traffic is expected to reach 451 exabytes per year by 2020, up from 105 exabytes per year in 2015, in Middle East and Africa.

Cisco's Global Cloud Index (2015-2020) highlighted that the rapid growth of cloud traffic is attributed to increased migration to cloud architectures and their ability to scale quickly and efficiently support more workloads than traditional data centres.

Cisco also revealed that within the MEA region, 65.0% of data centre traffic will remain within the data centre and consumer data centre traffic will represent 74% of total data centre traffic in 2020.

"Over the past year, we've seen a variety of businesses and organisations develop plans for cloud migration or adoption. The move to the cloud is imminent as cloud computing has advanced from an emerging technology to an essential scalable and flexible networking solution," said Mike Weston, Vice President, Middle East, Cisco. "With multiple trends influencing the growth of data centre and cloud computing such as increasing digitisation, the widespread adoption of multiple devices and connections and the growth of mobility, the importance of cloud readiness cannot be overemphasised."

"Although our region has made significant strides to reach a capable level of supporting basic and intermediate cloud services, the focus now turns to continuing to improve network capabilities to support the advanced cloud applications that organisations and end users expect and rely upon," added Weston.

Cisco also highlighted that consumer workloads are growing faster; by 2020 consumer workloads will account for 28% (134.3 million) of total data centre workloads, compared to 21% (38.6 million) in 2015. Plus social networking workloads will account for 24% of total consumer workloads in 2020 and video streaming workloads will account for 34% of total consumer workloads.