Cloud traffic in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) will more than quadruple by the end of 2019.
This is according to forecasts from the fifth annual Cisco Global Cloud Index, which also found that by 2019, 83% of all MEA data centre traffic will come from the cloud.
"The Cisco Global Cloud Index highlights the fact that cloud is moving well beyond a regional trend to becoming a mainstream solution, with cloud traffic expected to grow more than 30% in every worldwide region over the next five years," reveals Vernon Thaver, CTO of Cisco South Africa.
The report also found that, from a regional perspective, the MEA region is expected to have the highest cloud traffic growth rate at 41% by 2019. Consumer cloud demands will represent 61% of cloud data centre traffic by 2019, compared to 30% in 2014.
"South African enterprise and government organisations are moving from test cloud environments to trusting clouds with their mission-critical workloads. At the same time, consumers continue to expect on-demand, anytime access to their content and services nearly everywhere. This creates a tremendous opportunity for cloud operators, which will play an increasingly relevant role in the communications industry ecosystem," says Thaver.
Cisco says several factors are driving global cloud traffic's accelerating growth and the transition to cloud services, including the personal cloud demands of an increasing number of mobile devices. Other factors include the rapid growth in popularity of public cloud services for business, and the increased degree of virtualisation in private clouds which is increasing the density of those workloads. The growth of machine-to-machine connections also has the potential to drive more cloud traffic in the future.
In addition to the rapid growth of cloud traffic, Cisco predicts the Internet of everything will have a significant impact on data centre and cloud traffic growth.
"Today, only a small portion of this content is stored in data centres, but that could change as the application demand and uses of big data analytics evolves (ie, analysing collected data to make tactical and strategic decisions)," according to Cisco.
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