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The amount of traffic flowing through the world’s data centers is set to treble in the next four years, with the vast majority of this (76 percent) will being cloud-based traffic, says Cisco Systems Inc. in its annual Cloud Index study.

Cisco forecasts strong growth in the amount of cloud traffic, cloud storage and cloud workloads, with private cloud use being significantly larger than that of public cloud. As for overall data center traffic, this will grow to some 8.6 zettabytes a year in 2018, up from 3.1 zettabytes in 2013, amounting to 23 percent annual growth. To get an idea of the sheer amount of data, Cisco says 8.6 zettabytes is roughly equivalent to streaming all of the movies and TV shows ever made in 4K resolution over 250,000 times.

Cisco says increased Internet access and consumer cloud usage will be two of the main factors contributing to this growth. According to the United Nations, the world’s population will reach 7.6 billion by 2018, and 50 percent will have Internet access at home, with half of those also using personal cloud services.

As such, a growing number of countries will become “cloud ready”, says Cisco. 109 countries met the single advanced application criteria for fixed networks in 2014, up from 79 in 2013. Cisco’s report squares up with recent research from the International Data Corporation (IDC), which says public cloud revenues will hit around $127 billion by 2017. IDC’s forecast of a 23 percent annual cloud growth rate also tallies with Cisco’s research.

Another factor is the rise of consumer cloud storage – Cisco says the average netizen will chalk up around 800MB of traffic per month, which is about five times as much as in 2013.

As for the types of cloud being used, both public and private cloud will see significant growth.

“When people discuss cloud, they often focus on public cloud services or public cloud storage services,” said Kelly Ahuja, senior vice president, service provider business at Cisco. “However, a very significant majority of today’s cloud workloads are actually processed in private cloud environments. Even with public cloud workloads having significant growth, by 2018, almost 70% of cloud workloads will still be private cloud-related, requiring the ability of workloads to bridge across a hybrid private/public cloud environment.”

You can find the full 41 page report here.

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