Cloud Computing Is Becoming Ubiquitous; to Consume Three-Quarters of Data Center Traffic by 2018

By the DynaSis Team

Have you thought about the cloud lately? Are you thinking of moving your corporate assets to the cloud, or have you already done so? If not, get ready for a wake-up call. The cloud is expanding across everyone and into everything, whether we like it or not.

Virtually all technology solutions and devices, from backup appliances to software as a service (SaaS) offerings (where software is hosted in the cloud and accessed remotely), are consuming more cloud storage and Internet traffic every year. Because of this, Cisco recently announced that within the next four years, 76 percent of the Internet traffic through the world’s data centers will be cloud-based. That is a 40% increase over 2013, when the cloud accounted for 54 percent of total data center traffic.

Already, cloud data centers are responsible a total of 2,277 exabytes of the total 3,829 exabytes of traffic being generated. By 2018, this proportion will be 6,496 exabytes of a total of 8,574 exabytes. (An exabyte is one quintillion bytes or one billion gigabytes.)

Cisco also predicts a substantial shift to public cloud services as companies become more comfortable with them. By 2018, Cisco predicts, 31 percent of cloud workloads will be in public cloud data centers, up from 22 percent in 2013.  Interestingly, the devices that compose the Internet of Things (discussed here last week) are also going to contribute a significant amount of data to the cloud. Cisco predicts that data created by IoT devices will be 47 times greater than total data center traffic by 2018.

If all this growth sounds overwhelming, it is. After all, it’s hard to envision one billion gigabytes, or to conceive how the IoT actually functions. Nevertheless, major enterprises are embracing the cloud along with cloud solutions such as SaaS.

Big corporations know, for example that a cloud-hosted Microsoft Exchange server is far more reliable and less vulnerable than one deployed at a physical office location.  Most major enterprises realize that corporate networks are more vulnerable than data centers (which is where “the cloud” largely exists). More importantly, cybercriminals know this, as well. That’s why cyber-attacks on companies are more prevalent than attacks on data centers―and the majority of all successful data breaches occur through hacking of corporate servers.

Small and mid-sized businesses that want to be as productive and competitive as possible should create a plan for cloud adoption, now. It doesn’t have to involve a leap. It can be a step, possibly beginning with hosted Exchange as we mentioned above.

Here at DynaSis, we have developed hyper-secure cloud solutions, including private, corporate clouds where the firm retains control of its data and hosts it for remote workers. If you would like to learn more, please give us a call.