Cisco Forecasts Almost Fourfold Increase in Cloud Traffic by 2020

Cloud traffic is expected to rise 3.7-fold by 2020 from last year, Cisco forecast Thursday, to 14.1 ZB per year. Continued rapid growth will occur because the cloud's ability to scale quickly and efficiently will increasingly make it a more attractive option than traditional data centers, Cisco said. Consumer and business data workloads are expected to increase substantially through 2020, and firms' share of data center workloads is expected to decrease to 72 percent in 2020, from 79 percent, Cisco said. “Cloud computing has advanced from an emerging technology to an essential scalable and flexible part of architecture for service providers of all types around the globe," Vice President-Service Provider Marketing Doug Webster said in a news release. “Powered by video, IoT, SDN/NFV [software-defined networks and network function virtualization] and more, we forecast this significant cloud migration and the increased amount of network traffic generated as a result to continue at a rapid rate as operators streamline infrastructures to help them more profitably deliver IP-based services [to] businesses and consumers.”