If there were any lingering doubts about the embrace of cloud computing across all industry sectors, the latest market analysis from Cisco ought to lay them to rest. Within the next three years, the study concludes, more than four-fifths of all data center traffic, 83 percent, will be based in the cloud. What's more, most of this action will be going to public cloud services -- there will be more workloads (56 percent) in the public cloud than in private clouds (44 percent).
These are some of the many takeaways of Cisco's survey of data center traffic, which estimates that more than 500 zettabytes (ZBs) of data will be generated by all people, machines, and things by 2019, almost five times the 135 ZBs generated in 2014. Roughly three to four zettabytes of it moves across data networks at this time, a number projected to grow to 10 ZBs within three years.
The "machines and things" portion of this equation is also gaining ground, giving credence to talk of the looming ubiquity of the so-called Internet of Things, or IoT. About one-third of data -- 3.5 ZBs or so -- will be IoT-generated data within three years. After all, it's likely there will be at least 34 billion connected devices around that time.
Currently, about 65 percent of data center traffic is cloud based, a number that is projected to reach 83 percent by 2019. Workloads are following an almost identical trajectory.
Most of the growth is going to public cloud services, the study's authors observed. While the overall cloud workloads are growing at an annual rate (compounded) of 27 percent from 2014 to 2019, the public cloud workloads are going to grow at 44-percent rate from 2014 to 2019, and private cloud workloads will grow at a slower pace of 16 percent from 2014 to 2019. By 2018, they estimate, 56 percent of workloads will be in the public cloud.
"Although many mission-critical workloads might continue to be retained in the traditional data centers or private cloud, the public cloud adoption is increasing along with the gain in trust in public cloud," the Cisco analysts state. "Some enterprises might adopt a hybrid approach to cloud. In a hybrid cloud environment, some of the cloud computing resources are managed in-house by an enterprise and some are provided by an external provider. Cloud bursting is an example of hybrid cloud where daily computing requirements are handled by a private cloud, but for sudden spurts of demand the additional traffic demand (bursting) is handled by a public cloud."
In terms of type of cloud services, a majority will be applications, as the study finds Software as a Service (SaaS) is and will continue to be the dominant mode. Currently, about 45 percent of cloud implementations are SaaS, compared to 42 percent for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS -- processing, storage) and 13 percent Platform as a Service (PaaS -- middleware, development environments, databases). In three years, 59 percent of cloud implementations will be SaaS, compared to 28 percent IaaS and 11 percent PaaS. However, it's also notable that since cloud adoption is expanding at such a torrid pace, all three modes will keep expanding as well.
The growing acceptance of public cloud is also fueling the continuing dominance of the SaaS approach, the survey's authors explain. "In the private cloud, initial deployments were predominantly IaaS. Test and development types of cloud services were the first to be used in the enterprise; cloud was a radical change in deploying IT services, and this use was a safe and practical initial use of private cloud for enterprises. It was limited, and it did not pose a risk of disrupting the workings of IT resources in the enterprise. As trust in adoption of SaaS or mission-critical applications builds over time with technology enablement in processing power, storage advancements, memory advancements, and networking advancements, we foresee the adoption of SaaS type applications to accelerate over the forecast period, while shares of IaaS and PaaS workloads decline."
The Cisco report also puts things in their proper perspective: "spend on public IaaS and PaaS is still small compared with spend on enterprise data center equipment, data center facilities, and associated operating expenses. These cloud services will gain momentum over the forecast period as more competitive offers come to the market and continue to build enterprise trust for outsourcing these more technical and fundamental services."
