Cloud computing data traffic set to grow

Thursday, December 01, 2011

The rapid adoption of cloud computing services is expected to result in increased data traffic crossing the platform in the near future, according to a recent study by a cloud vendor.

The company's study projects the cloud to account for 51 percent of all data center workloads by 2014. By 2015, global cloud computing traffic will grow 12-fold from 130 exabytes to 1.6 zettabytes.

This amount of data is equal to 22 trillion hours of streaming music and 5 trillion hours of conferencing through a webcam, according to the research.

"By 2015, 76 percent of data center traffic will remain within the data center itself as workloads migrate between various virtual machines and background tasks take place, 17 percent of the total traffic leaves the data center to be delivered to the end user, while an additional 7 percent of total traffic is generated between data centers through activities such as cloud-bursting, data replication and updates," said the study.

Cloud computing remains an important global IT development. According to research firm Gartner, the cloud is one of 10 strategic technologies expected to make its presence felt in 2012.