MEA cloud data centre traffic to grow 440% by 2020, says Cisco report

MEA cloud data centre traffic to grow 440% by 2020, says Cisco report

The recently released sixth annual Cisco Global Cloud Index (2015-2020) reveals that global cloud traffic is expected to rise 3.7-fold, up from 3.9 zettabytes (ZB) per year in 2015 to 14.1 ZB per year by 2020. In Middle East and Africa, data centre traffic will reach 451 exabytes per year by 2020, up from 105 exabytes per year in 2015. This rapid growth of cloud traffic is attributed to increased migration to cloud architectures and their ability to scale quickly and efficiently support more workloads than traditional data centres.

With greater data centre virtualisation, cloud operators are also able to achieve greater operational efficiencies while flexibly delivering a growing variety of services to businesses and consumers with optimal performance. To better understand data centre growth, new analysis on application workloads was developed for this year’s report. The following business and consumer projections were revealed:

Business workloads dominate data centre applications and are growing:

  • Business workloads will grow by 2.4 fold from 2015 to 2020 but their overall share of data centre workloads will decrease from 79% to 72%.

Consumer workloads, while smaller in number, are growing faster: During the same time, consumer workloads will grow faster by 3.5 fold.

  • By 2020, consumer workloads will account for 28% (134.3 million) of total data centre workloads, compared to 21% (38.6 million) in 2015.
  • By 2020, video streaming workloads will account for 34% of total consumer workloads, compared to 29% in 2015.
  • By 2020, social networking workloads will account for 24% of total consumer workloads, compared to 20% in 2015.

IoT/analytics/database workloads are growing the most in terms of share of business workloads with collaboration and compute workloads largely maintaining their share.

Video and social networking will lead the increase in consumer workloads, each respectively grows their percentage significantly.

  • By 2020: video streaming workloads will account for 34% of total consumer workloads, compared to 29 percent in 2015; social networking workloads will account for 24 percent of total consumer workloads, compared to 20 percent in 2015; search workloads will account for 15% of total consumer workloads, compared to 17% in 2015.

“Over the past year, we’ve seen a variety of businesses and organisations develop plans for cloud migration or adoption. The move to the cloud is imminent as cloud computing has advanced from an emerging technology to an essential scalable and flexible networking solution,” said Mike Weston, Vice President, Middle East, Cisco. “With multiple trends influencing the growth of data centre and cloud computing such as increasing digitisation, the widespread adoption of multiple devices and connections and the growth of mobility, the importance of cloud readiness cannot be over emphasised.”

“Although our region has made significant strides to reach a capable level of supporting basic and intermediate cloud services, the focus now turns to continuing to improve network capabilities to support the advanced cloud applications that organisations and end users expect and rely upon,” added Weston.

For the first time, Cisco also quantified and analysed the impact of hyper-scale data centres. These data centres are expected to grow from 259 in 2015 to 485 by 2020. These infrastructures will account for 47% of total data centre installed servers and support 53% of all data centre traffic by 2020.

A key infrastructure trend is transforming hyper-scale (and other) data centres. Software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualisation (NFV) are helping to flatten data centre architectures and streamline traffic flows. Over the next five years, nearly 60% of global hyper-scale data centres are expected to deploy SDN/NFV solutions. By 2020, 44% of traffic within data centres will be supported by SDN/NFV platforms (up from 23% in 2015) as operators strive for greater efficiencies.

Middle East and Africa Global Cloud Index Forecasted Highlights and Projections:

Data centre traffic highlights

  • In Middle East and Africa, data centre traffic will reach 451 Exabytes per year by 2020, up from 105 Exabytes per year in 2015.
  • In Middle East and Africa, data centre traffic will grow 4.3-fold by 2020, at a CAGR of 34% from 2015 to 2020.
  • In Middle East and Africa, data centre traffic grew 53% in 2015, up from 69 Exabytes per year (5.7 Exabytes per month) in 2014.
  • In Middle East and Africa, 65.0% of data centre traffic will remain within the data centre by 2020, compared to 73.7% in 2015.
  • In Middle East and Africa, consumer data centre traffic will represent 74% of total data centre traffic by 2020, compared to 37% in 2015.

Cloud traffic highlights

  • In Middle East and Africa, cloud data centre traffic will represent 67% of total data centre traffic by 2020, compared to 66% in 2015.
  • In Middle East and Africa, cloud data centre traffic will reach 304 Exabytes per year (25 Exabytes per month) by 2020, up from 69 Exabytes per year (5.8 Exabytes per month) in 2015.
  • In Middle East and Africa, cloud data centre traffic will grow 4.4-fold by 2020, at a CAGR of 34% from 2015 to 2020.
  • In Middle East and Africa, cloud data centre traffic grew 63% in 2015, up from 43 Exabytes per year (3.5 Exabytes per month) in 2014.
  • In Middle East and Africa, consumer will represent 68% of cloud data centre traffic by 2020, compared to 33% in 2015.

Traditional traffic highlights

  • In Middle East and Africa, traditional data centre traffic will represent 33% of total data centre traffic by 2020, compared to 34% in 2015.
  • In Middle East and Africa, traditional data centre traffic will reach 147 Exabytes per year (12 Exabytes per month) by 2020, up from 36 Exabytes per year (3.0 Exabytes per month) in 2015.
  • In Middle East and Africa, traditional data centre traffic will grow 4.1-fold by 2020, at a CAGR of 32% from 2015 to 2020.
  • In Middle East and Africa, traditional data centre traffic grew 38% in 2015, up from 26 Exabytes per year (2.2 Exabytes per month) in 2014.
  • In Middle East and Africa, consumer will represent 89% of traditional data centre traffic by 2020, compared to 46% in 2015.

Index Overview:

The Cisco Global Cloud Index (2015-2020) was developed to estimate global data centre and cloud-based traffic growth and trends. The report serves as a complementary resource to existing Internet Protocol (IP) network traffic studies such as the Cisco Visual Networking Index, providing new insights and visibility into emerging trends affecting data centres and cloud architectures. The forecast becomes increasingly important as the network and data centre become more intrinsically linked in offering cloud services.

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