Cisco, which measures these things, has just released an assessment showing that cloud traffic could rise 3.7 times by 2020, from 3.9 zebytes per year in 2015 to 14.1 zebytes per year in 2020 (the latest annual data is valid).
Big data and related Internet of things contribute greatly to this growth. Compared with 20% in 2015, database, analytics and Internet of Things will account for 22% of the total business workload by 2020. In 2020, the total data generated by the Internet of Things will reach 600 zebytes per year, 275 times the predicted traffic (2.2 zebytes) from the data center to the end user/device, and 39 times the predicted total traffic (15.3 zebytes) from the data center.
The survey also found that public cloud will grow faster than private cloud. By 2020, 68% (298 million) of cloud workload will be in public cloud data centers, up 49% (663 million) from 2015. Over the same period, 32% (142 million) of cloud workload will be in private cloud data centers, down 51% (697 million) from 2015. As the Cisco team explained, the shift to public clouds is more likely to be part of a hybrid cloud strategy. For example, "Cloud bursts will be an example of hybrid clouds where daily computing needs are handled by private clouds, but sudden additional traffic requirements - bursts - will be handled by public clouds".
Cisco's forecast also shows that although software as a service will continue to climb, infrastructure as a service is relatively slow. By 2020, 74% of cloud computing workload will be software as a service workload, up from 65% today. Platform as a service (Platform as a service, for development tools, databases and intermediary software) will also increase significantly - 8% of cloud computing workload will be platform as a service workload, down from 9% in 2015. However, the workload of software as a service will occupy 17% of the total cloud computing work, which is lower than the current 26%.
Cisco analysts explained that the low percentage of software as a service growth may be related to the gradual shift of private clouds to public cloud providers. For beginners, software as a service is much less disruptive to business --- if you like, it's just a rearrangement of data center resources. As software as a service products become increasingly complex, those vendors may secretly support software as a service. "The experimental development sample of cloud service is first applied to enterprises; cloud is a tremendous change in the deployment of information technology services, which is the first application of private cloud in enterprises. It is limited and will not cause the risk of disrupting the information technology resources of enterprises. With the adoption of software as a service or task-critical applications over a long period of time and the implementation of technologies in processing power, storage progress, memory progress and network progress, we predict that the adoption of software as a service-type applications will accelerate, while the share of infrastructure as a service and platform as a service will increase. It will fall.
On the user side, video and social networking will lead to an increase in customer workload. Compared with 513 MB per month in 2015, cloud storage traffic per user will reach 1.7 GB per month by 2020. Compared with 29% in 2015, video data traffic will occupy 34% of customer workload in 2020. The proportion of social network workload to customer workload will rise from 20% in 2015 to 24% in 2020. Over the next five years, 59% of netizens (2.3 billion users) will use cloud storage, compared with 47% in 2015 (1.3 billion users).
