Canada is ready for the cloud and good thing considering that cloud traffic is expected to rise 370 per cent from 2015 to 2020, according to a new report from networking vendor Cisco Systems Inc.
Globally cloud traffic is predicted to rise up from 3.9 zettabytes in 2015 to 14.1 zettabytes in the year 2020, according to the sixth annual Cisco Global Cloud Index. As the cloud model of managing IT resources becomes more popular compared to traditional, siloed data centres, traffic to data centres is the metric indicating that shift. By 2020, public cloud growth (such as that provided by Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure) will outpace private cloud growth.
To be ready to compete in a world of instantly-scalable infrastructure, Canada’s connectivity need to be ready to transfer data at speed. According to Cisco’s data, it is ready with average download speeds of 25.9 mbps for fixed wireline download and 8.3 mbps for upload. Those speeds are well behind the average speeds seen in the U.S., Russia, China and much of Europe – but according to Cisco, they’re still good enough.
As to wireless speeds, Canada is doing better. It sees download speeds of 24.2 mbps and upload speeds of 9 mbps. Compare that to the U.S. at 17.1 mbps download speeds and 9.9 mbps upload. In Russia, both download and upload speeds are close to 7.5 mbps.
To be able to rely on advanced cloud apps, Cisco’s baseline requirement is a download speed of better than 2.5 mbps download and 1 mbps upload.
Cloud’s projected growth in the enterprise
With all cloud data centre traffic growing to 14.1 ZB per year in 2020, it will dwarf traditional data centre traffic at 1.3 ZB per year, which is seeing a more modest growth. Workloads per physical server will also go up from 7.3 in 2015 to 11.9 by 2020 in the cloud. At traditional data centres, workloads per physical server will be at 3.5.
Major sources of data driving the need for more storage and processing power include big data, which will increase 530 per cent between 2015-2020 and the Internet of Things, which may reach 600 ZB per year by 2020.
Company’s private data centres will be used more to deliver applications than as a means to provide infrastructure as a service, as that functionality with be pushed to the public cloud. In North America, Cisco forecasts that in 2020 IaaS workloads will be 11 per cent of total private cloud workloads, down from 36 per cent in 2015.
Meanwhile in North America software as a service workloads will grow both in the public cloud (at a rate of 30 per cent annually) and in private cloud (to 54.4 million workloads in 2020 compared to 16.5 million in 2015).
