Cloud services are becoming so ubiquitous that they will account for virtually all data center traffic within the next three years, according to a new report from Cisco Systems Inc.

The latest Cisco Global Cloud Index published this week says both business and consumer applications are contributing to the growth of cloud services. So are improvements in data center governance and data control, leading Cisco to predict that 94 percent of workloads and instances will be processed by cloud data centers in 2021. By that time, dedicated servers will have become a rarity in enterprise data center environments.

It’s a bold prediction, given that many critical applications still reside in corporate data centers and seem unlikely to move out of them that quickly given the downside of glitches. Also, current data governance regulations still mandate that some data must remain siloed in data centers.

One of the main drivers fueling this race to the cloud is the explosion of software-as-a-service workloads, Cisco said. By 2021, 75 percent of the total cloud workloads and compute instances in the world will be SaaS-based, up from 71 percent in 2016.

The rapidly growing amount of data center traffic in general is also contributing to the shift towards cloud workloads, Cisco said. The networking giant said that the world’s total data center traffic should triple in 2021, with traffic in North America set to grow from 2.8 zettabytes per year in 2016 to 8 zettabytes (1 zettabyte equals 1 billion terabytes). The Asia-Pacific region will also see massive growth, with data center traffic expected to increase from 2.1 zettabytes to 6.7 zettabytes in 2021.

The “internet of things” is another major driver of cloud services. IoT applications such as smart cars, smart cities, connected health and digital utilities need highly scalable compute and storage systems to accommodate growth in demand. As such, Cisco reckons IoT connections to the cloud will hit 13.7 billion in 2021, up from 5.8 billion in 2016.

Demand for cloud services is also giving rise to much bigger “hyperscale” data centers. Cisco reckons there will be 628 hyperscale data centers globally by 2021, up from 338 in 2016. Big data will account for 20 percent of global data center traffic by 2021, while video will take up 10 percent.

“Data center application growth is clearly exploding in this new multicloud world,” said Kip Compton, vice president of Cisco’s Cloud Platform and Solutions Group. “This projected growth will require new innovations especially in the areas of public, private and hybrid clouds.”

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