By 2015, Cloud Computing will account for nearly 34% of traffic at the world's data centres - and will be growing faster than any other form of data centre traffic.
Last year the Cloud accounted for only about 11% of data centre traffic, but according to Cisco's first "Cloud Index" data moved via Cloud Computing to grow 12-fold in the next five years, and the company estimates that Cloud traffic in 2015 will hit 137 exabytes per month and 1.6 zettabytes—or 1.6 trillion gigabytes—annually by 2015.
So what’s a zettabyte? Well, it’s equal to 1 billion terabytes or approximately equivalent to:
- 22 trillion hours of streaming music
- 5 trillion hours of business Web conferencing with a webcam
- 1.6 trillion hours of online HD video streaming.
The Global Cloud Index report is based on a modeling and analysis that includes more than 30 terabytes of data generated each month over the past year from data centres around the globe, measurements of more than 45 million broadband-speed tests, and third-party market forecasts. Cisco noted:
