Regionally speaking, North America will have the highest cloud traffic volume (3.6 ZB) by 2019, followed by Asia Pacific (2.3 ZB) and Western Europe (1.5 ZB).
In addition, North America will also have the highest data centre traffic volume (4.5 ZB) by 2019, again followed by Asia Pacific (2.7 ZB) and Western Europe (1.8 ZB).
To help put things in perspective, 10.4 ZB is equivalent to 144 trillion hours of streaming music which is subsequently equivalent to about 26 months of continuous music streaming for the world’s population of around 7.6 billion people in 2019.
Consumer cloud storage
By 2019, Webster claims 55 percent (more than two billion users) of the consumer Internet population will use personal cloud storage up from 42 percent (1.1 billion users) in 2014.
Globally, consumer cloud storage traffic per user will be 1.6 gigabytes per month by 2019, compared to 992 megabytes per month in 2014.
In 2014, 73 percent of data stored on client devices resided on PCs and by 2019, the majority of stored data (51 percent) will move to non-PC devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, M2M modules, et al.).
As the volume of stored data increases, Cisco predicts a greater demand for consumer cloud storage.
For example, the forecast estimates that by 2017, global smartphone traffic (201 EB per year) will exceed the amount of data stored (179 EB per year) on those devices - necessitating the need for greater storage capabilities via the cloud.
Data centre virtualisation
Overall data centre workloads will more than double from 2014 to 2019, however, cloud workloads will more than triple over the same period.
The workload density (that is, workloads per physical server) for cloud data centres was 5.1 in 2014 and will grow to 8.4 by 2019.
Comparatively, for traditional data centres, workload density was 2.0 in 2014 and will grow to 3.2 by 2019.
Globally, the data created by IoE connections will reach 507.5 zettabytes per year (42.3 zettabytes per month) by 2019, up from 134.5 zettabytes per year (11.2 ZB per month) in 2014 with a smart city of one million set to generate 180 million gigabytes of data per day by 2019.
Private vs. Public cloud
Public cloud, in which services are rendered over a network that is open for public use, is growing faster than private cloud, which includes cloud infrastructure operated for a single organisation, in terms of workloads.
However, throughout the five-year forecast, private cloud will continue to outpace public cloud in its degree of virtualisation.
With businesses increasingly assessing the cost associated with IT dedicated resources and demanding for more agility, public cloud adoption will rise.
Going forward, the Cisco Cloud Index projects that public cloud workloads are going to grow at a 44-percent Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) from 2014 to 2019 while private cloud workloads will grow at a slower pace (16-percent CAGR) from 2014 to 2019.
By 2019, the findings claim that 56 percent of the cloud workloads will be in public cloud data centres, up from 30 percent in 2014.
Furthermore, by 2019, 44 percent of the cloud workloads will be in private cloud data centres, down from 70 percent in 2014.
Cloud workloads
According to Cisco, SaaS will be the most popular and adopted service model for public and private cloud workloads, respectively, by 2019.
By 2019, 59 percent of the total cloud workloads will be Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) workloads, up from 45 percent in 2014.
In addition, by 2019, 30 percent of the total cloud workloads will be Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) workloads, down from 42 percent in 2014.
And finally, in three years time, 11 percent of the total cloud workloads will be Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) workloads, down from 13 percent in 2014.
To assess cloud readiness, Cisco analyses the average and median upload/download speeds and latencies of fixed and mobile networks for more than 150 countries.
This year, 81 countries met the single advanced application readiness criteria for mobile networks; a significant increase from last year’s 21 countries while119 countries, met the single advanced application criteria for fixed networks; up from 109 countries last year.