Cloud traffic in the Middle East and Africa (including South Africa) is forecase to more than quadruple by the end of 2019 – and, 2019, 83% of all MEA data centre traffic will come from the cloud.
These are among the findings from the fifth annual Cisco Global Cloud Index (2014-2019), which found that the MEA region is expected to have the highest cloud traffic growth rate at 41% by 2019.
Several factors are driving cloud traffic’s accelerating growth and the transition to cloud services, including the personal cloud demands of an increasing number of mobile devices; the rapid growth in popularity of public cloud services for business, and the increased degree of virtualisation in private clouds which is increasing the density of those workloads. The growth of machine-to-machine (M2M) connections also has the potential to drive more cloud traffic in the future.
“The Cisco Cloud Index highlights the fact that cloud is moving well beyond a regional trend to becoming a mainstream solution, with cloud traffic expected to grow more than 30% in every worldwide region over the next five years,” says Vernon Thaver, chief technology officer of Cisco South Africa. “South African enterprise and government organisations are moving from test cloud environments to trusting clouds with their mission-critical workloads.
“At the same time, consumers continue to expect on-demand, anytime access to their content and services nearly everywhere. This creates a tremendous opportunity for cloud operators, which will play an increasingly relevant role in the communications industry ecosystem.”
In addition to the rapid growth of cloud traffic, Cisco predicts that the Internet of Everything (IoE) – the connection of people, processes, data and things – will have a significant impact on data centre and cloud traffic growth. Today, only a small portion of this content is stored in data centres, but that could change as the application demand and uses of big data analytics evolves (the analysing of collected data to make tactical and strategic decisions).
New technologies such as SDN and NFV are also expected to streamline data centre traffic flows, such that the traffic volumes reaching the highest tier (core) of the data centre may fall below 10,4 zetabytes per year and lower data centre tiers could carry over 40 zetabytes of traffic per year
Some of the MEA (including SA) key highlights from the Cisco Cloud Index include:
* Data centre traffic will grow four-fold, up by 32% from 2014 to 2019;
* Cloud data centre traffic will represent 86% of total data centre traffic by 2019, compared to 61% in 2014;
* Consumer will represent 61% of cloud data centre traffic by 2019, compared to 30% in 2014; and
* 7,1% of data centre traffic will travel between data centres by 2019, compared to 7,1% in 2014.
