Thanks to growing adoption of cloud architecture by more and more enterprises, cloud traffic is poised to exceed 15.3 ZB by 2020, causing a 262 percent growth in data center traffic as per Cisco Global Cloud Index. The report goes on to predict migration of 92 percent of workloads to cloud by 2020.

Growth of Hyperscale Data Centers

The growth of cloud traffic of such magnitude will result in simultaneous increase in number of hyperscale data centers from the current level of 259 to 485 thus registering a whopping growth of 226 percent.

The credit to the extensive adoption of cloud architecture must go to IT industry as a whole for transforming cloud technology from an upcoming technology to a flexible and scalable networking option. It is observed that data centers are in the process of being optimized to meet exponential demands of consumers as well as businesses in response to massive cloud deployments.

According to Doug Webster, VP of service provider marketing at Cisco, operators of data center services need to invest in innovative cloud based solutions that would help streamline IT infrastructures to facilitate diverse categories of end users to gain access to web based cloud services.

Importance of Hyperscale Data Centers

Hyperscale data centers have potential for huge revenue generation through Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, or Software as a Service. The significance of estimating projected number of hyper scale data centers can be understood by knowing their contribution in growth as well as consolidation of cloud industry.

Large number of hyperscale data centers that would be added to the existing pool of data centers will be housing 47 percent of total web servers that will possess 47 per cent of global processing power and handle more than half of entire data center traffic.

On account of the least data center traffic in 2015, Middle East and Africa will account for the highest growth in number of new hyperscale data centers taking the existing data center traffic of 105 exabytes to 451 exabytes registering a growth of 34 percent CAGR by 2020. North America would be adding around 5 ZB by 2020 with CAGR 27 percent as per the expert findings.

Growth of Workloads and Data Center Efficiency

Data centers are assuming prominence not only due to their data storage capabilities but also dust their efficient delivery of services such as Netflix. Regarding the location of data, one needs to appreciate that data centers account for 900 exabytes of data and there is 5.2 ZB of data being stored in various devices.

Interestingly, 600 ZB of data is generated elsewhere. Connected devices including cars and planes and medical imaging can also account for considerable portion of floating data that is hardly being captured.

There are more relevant findings of Cisco report that confirms tipping of large number of workloads to public cloud from private cloud environments. The expected rate of public cloud’s growth is around 35 percent as against just 25 percent for private cloud. This will be influenced by economy considerations and enhanced security measures being adopted in public cloud.

Cisco projects a handsome growth for SaaS workloads to be 74 percent by 2020 from existing growth rate of 65 percent. The total market share of IaaS and PaaS would see a downward trend from 26 to 17 percent and from 9 to 8 percent respectively.

Cloud workloads will see a shift to consumer workloads from enterprise workloads that will get some booster from IoT and Big Data. Innovative architectural solutions including software defined networking as well as network function virtualizations are responsible for the much needed streamlining of IT infrastructures causing significant growth of workload density in terms of workload per server.

Shift to hyperscale data centers will be necessary to handle growth in workloads. Hyperscale data centers are designed to handle multiple workloads as opposed to conventional environment. One can expect nearly two third of all workloads being processed by cloud data centers.

Emergence of Smart Devices

Cloud computing will also be accelerated by business and consumer applications that leverage remote data access as these become more and more common in terms of usage and worldwide availability. This also explains massive growth of personal cloud traffic that will involve cloud based storage of videos, music, and photos that could be retrieved by using internet enabled handheld devices such as smart-phones and tablets among others.

Internet of Things is going to multiply the number of devices that can be used at home or workplace. This is going to be a vital factor in migration to cloud based services that will enable easy access to wide spectrum of applications as well as content via a plethora of smart devices from any geographical location.

The principal drivers for transition to cloud are influenced by need for better access and faster content delivery. Cloud adoption is also proving to boost performance of applications as well as boost operational efficiencies. This underlines the shift to hyperscale data centers that are highly efficient.

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