A new report from Cisco says that global cloud computing traffic will surge from 1.2 zettabytes in 2012 to 5.3 zettabytes by 2017—that’s a 4.5-fold increase, or a compound annual growth rate of 35 percent.
In addition, the report predicts that cloud traffic will account for 51 percent of all data center traffic by 2014 and 69 percent of all data center traffic by 2017. In 2012, the cloud accounted for 46 percent of data center traffic.
“People all over the world continue to demand the ability to access personal, business and entertainment content anywhere on any device, and each transaction in a virtualized, cloud environment can cause cascading effects on the network,” said Cisco’s Doug Merritt. “Because of this continuing trend, we are seeing huge increases in the amount of cloud traffic within, between and beyond data centers over the next four years.”