By 2018, Three Quarters of the World’s Data Traffic Will Use the Cloud

A study from September 2013 by TheInfoPro, a service of 451 Research, predicted explosive growth for cloud technology. The data was from the first six months of 2013. The results predicted that the cloud market would grow at a rate of 36 percent compound annual growth rate and reach a market size of $19.5 billion by 2016. By the spring of 2014, however, Forrester Research was reporting that the market will reach over $190 billion by 2020.

Cisco’s report supports the reports of unprecedented growth in its Fourth Annual Global Cloud Index. The Index predicts that global data center traffic will triple from 2013 to 2018. Traffic will increase from approximately 3.1 zettabytes per year in 2013 to over eight zettabytes in 2018. A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes. A&A Search provides some highlights concerning cloud computing and its development:

  • Cisco explains that eight zettabytes of data center traffic is equivalent to streaming all 500,000 movies and three million television shows ever made in ultra-high definition 250,000 times.
  • Almost 40 percent of companies surveyed have a separate cloud computing budget in addition to their organizational IT budget, indicating changes in accounting and budgeting practices. To put the value of cloud technology into perspective, a typical enterprise cloud computing mean budget is over $8 million.
  • The top cloud computing projects for organizations currently include internal private cloud projects at 35 percent and cloud assessment and strategy planning at 33 percent. Assessment and strategy have seen the greatest increase in activity as firms try to become more agile in terms of IT. Not surprisingly, security is the greatest problem with respect to the adoption of cloud computing. The integration of legacy and existing systems and insufficient internal processes are also cited as problems.

Despite the reported pain points, Cisco reports that the cloud will host almost 80 percent of total data traffic by 2018. Additionally, the report predicts that 50 percent of the world’s population will have Internet access at home and over 50 percent will store content on personal cloud storage.

Sharon Guadin of IT World writes that competition among market players such as Google, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft is increasing. Google recently updated features and lowered prices for cloud services.

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