International. Global Cloud traffic will quadruple over the next five years, reaching a total of 8.6 Zettabytes annually (719 Exabytes per month) by the end of 2019, up from 2.1 Zettabytes in 2014, representing a year-on-year increase rate of 33 percent.
This is clear from the fifth annual Cisco Global Cloud Index report (2014-2019), which also predicts that global data center traffic (the traffic that travels within data centers, between data centers and to end users) will triple in that period reaching a total of 10.4 Zettabytes per year in 2019 from 3.4 Zettabytes registered in 2014.
Of that total (10.4 ZB), Cloud traffic (the fastest-growing data center traffic component generated by Cloud services accessible over the Internet from virtualized Cloud data centers) will account for 83 percent.
To better understand this data, one Zettabyte corresponds to 1,000 million Terabytes or 1 trillion Gigabytes, while 10.4 Zettabytes is equivalent to 144 billion hours of streaming music or the equivalent of about 26 months of uninterrupted music streaming for the total world population predicted in 2019.
Different factors are accelerating the growth of Cloud traffic and the transition to Cloud services, including the increased demand for personal cloud storage due to the exponential increase in mobile devices, the growing use of public Cloud services by companies, the greater virtualization of private Cloud environments and the proliferation of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) connections in the new era of the Internet of Everything (IoE).
In this sense, Cisco foresees that the IoE – the connection of people, processes, data and objects – will play an essential role in the growth of data center and Cloud traffic. Cloud applications will generate large volumes of data that will reach 507.5 Zettabytes per year (42.3 Zettabytes per month) in 2019 from 134.5 Zettabytes per year (11.2 ZB per month) recorded in 2014, multiplying by 49 times the global data center traffic expected for 2019 (10.4 ZB). As an example, a smart city with 1 million inhabitants will generate 180 million Gigabytes of data daily in 2019.
