Business Technology Roundtable

The savvy CEOs that approved significant investments in business technology during 2014 are reaping the rewards of their first-to-market leadership advantage. Meanwhile, executives at the fast-follower companies are no doubt assessing how they plan to catch-up with the early-adopters of cloud services in 2015. This rapidly evolving IT transformation scenario is pervasive. It's happening in every corner of the globe. So, what's the outlook for worldwide cloud service adoption and how will the key trends impact cloud computing infrastructure investment? To get the answers to those questions, we'll look at the findings from the latest Cisco Global Cloud Index (GCI). Cisco forecasts continued strong growth of cloud traffic, cloud workloads and cloud storage -- with private cloud significantly larger than public cloud. Over the next five years, their market study projects data center traffic to nearly triple, with cloud representing 76 percent of total data center traffic. ...

In the third annual Global Cloud Index, Cisco forecasts that global cloud traffic, the fastest growing component of data center traffic, is expected to grow 4.5-fold -- that's a 35 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) -- from 1.2 zettabytes of annual traffic in 2012 to 5.3 zettabytes by 2017. The Cisco Global Cloud Index (2012–2017) was developed to estimate data center and cloud-based Internet Protocol (IP) traffic growth and trends. The Index serves as a complementary resource to existing network traffic studies, providing new insights and visibility into emerging trends affecting data centers and cloud architectures. The forecast becomes increasingly important as the network and data center become more intrinsically linked in offering cloud services . Overall global data center traffic will grow threefold and reach a total of 7.7 zettabytes annually by 2017. Approximately 17 percent of data center traffic will be fueled by end users accessing clouds for web surfing,...

In the second annual Cisco Global Cloud Index (2011-2016) , Cisco forecasts global data center traffic to grow fourfold and reach a total of 6.6 zettabytes annually by 2016. The company also predicts global cloud traffic, the fastest-growing component of data center traffic, to grow sixfold – a 44 percent combined annual growth rate (CAGR) – from 683 exabytes of annual traffic in 2011 to 4.3 zettabytes by 2016. For context, 6.6 zettabytes is equivalent to: 92 trillion hours of streaming music – Equivalent to about 1.5 years of continuous music streaming for the world's population in 2016. 16 trillion hours of business Web conferencing – Equivalent to about 12 hours of daily Web conferencing for the world's workforce in 2016. 7 trillion hours of online high-definition (HD) video streaming – Equivalent to about 2.5 hours of daily streamed HD video for the world's population in 2016. The vast majority of the data center traffic is not caused by end use...