Cisco Cloud Index: Cloud Traffic Will Represent More Than 2/3 of Global Data Center Traffic by 2017 and Will Grow More than Fourfold From 2012 to 2017.

In the third annual Cisco® Global Cloud Index (2012 – 2017) issued yesterday, Connectikpeople has observed that , global cloud traffic, the fastest growing component of data center traffic, is expected to grow 4.5-fold , a 35 percent combined annual growth rate (CAGR) , from 1.2 zettabytes of annual traffic in 2012 to 5.3 zettabytes by 2017.

In addition according to the same Indedx , overall global data center traffic will grow threefold and reach a total of 7.7 zettabytes annually by 2017.

Approximately 17 percent of data center traffic will be fueled by end users accessing
clouds for web surfing, video streaming, collaboration and connected devices, all of which contribute to the Internet of Everything, which is the networked connection of people, data, process and things.

For the period 2012–2017, Cisco forecasts that 7 percent of data center traffic will be generated between data centers, primarily driven by data replication and software/system updates. An additional 76 percent of data center traffic will stay within the data center and will be largely generated by storage, production and development data in a virtualized environment.

From a regional perspective, the Cisco Global Cloud Index predicts that through 2017, the Middle East and Africa will have the highest cloud traffic growth rate (57 percent CAGR), followed by Asia Pacific (43 percent CAGR) and Central and Eastern Europe (36 percent CAGR).