Asia Pacific will generate the most cloud traffic by 2016 as compared to North America and Western Europe.
The second annual Cisco Global Cloud Index (2011-2016) indicates that Asia Pacific will process the most cloud workloads – about 36 percent of the global cloud workloads by 2016.
Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan are identified as the nation’s best prepared to lead this trend.
Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and China are the emerging countries that will contribute heavily to this trend, according to Cisco that also notes Asia Pacific as ready to support advanced cloud computing applications over fixed networks.
The Index says 2014 will be the first year when the majority of workloads shift to the cloud. More than 50 percent of all workloads by that time will be processed in the cloud versus 48 percent in the traditional IT space.
Four-fold increase in traffic
Cisco also predicts a four-fold increase in global data centre traffic by 2016 and notes that the vast majority of the data centre traffic is caused by data centres and cloud-computing workloads used in activities that are virtually invisible to individuals.
About 76 percent of data centre traffic will stay within the data centre and will be largely generated by storage, production and development data during 2011-2016.
Seven percent of data centre traffic will be generated between data centres, and 17 percent of data centre traffic will be fuelled by end-users accessing clouds for Web surfing, e-mailing and video streaming.
The Middle East and Africa will have the highest cloud traffic growth rate through 2016. The Asia Pacific region will process the most cloud workloads, followed by North America by this time.
“This year’s forecast confirms that strong growth in data centre usage and cloud traffic are global trends, driven by our growing desire to access personal and business content anywhere, on any device,” said Doug Merritt, senior vice president, Corporate Marketing, Cisco. “When you couple this growth with projected increases in connected devices and objects, the next-generation Internet will be an essential component to enabling much greater data centre virtualisation and a new world of interconnected clouds.”
