The cloud computing services and applications are being adopted at a rapid pace. The infrastructural change from the physical data center to cloud data center is creating an on growing demand for cloud infrastructure.   Enterprises and users are contributing to the growth of cloud-based data centers. On the user side, as the internet has connectivity became promising, the request for on-demand entrainment proliferated. Social Networking websites and use of the cloud-based platform for saving personal data increased many folds. For enterprises, the demand for better analytics to study data, ease technology transformation and better ROI with cloud infrastructure drove them towards the cloud. Major enterprise apps are now being shifted on cloud and data traffic is expected to touch 19.5 zettabytes (ZB) per year by 2021. According to Cisco, we would be seeing rapid adoption of cloud, the increase in data volume from mere 6ZB per year in 2016. The cloud data center traffic would represent 95 percent of the total data center traffic by 2021 compared to 88 percent in 2016.

The demand for cloud data centers would also increase because enterprises would now be burdening the data center servers to handle processing and traffic. The implementation of the Internet of Things (IoT) such as smart cities and electronic health devices will require a cloud-based technology. Cisco believes that IoT connections will reach nearly 13.7 billion up from 5.8 billion in 2016.  The networking giant said that data centers will be holding 53 percent of the servers, increase from 27 percent in 2016. The need for Hyper-scale data centers that will act as a cloud platform will increase from 338 to 628 by 2021. The amount of data stored in the datacenter has seen a rapid increase from 51 percent to 65 percent by 2021. Download a whitepaper on Cloud Data Center Solutions.

The Hyper-Scale Cloud Data Centers Are Defined By Cisco In Simple Terms

1. A company must have more than $1 Billion in Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Examples- Amazon/AWS, Rackspace, NTT, IBM or A company that has $2 Billion in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Examples- Salesforce, Google, Microsoft or Oracle.

2. An internet/ search/ social networking with $4 Billion. Example- Facebook, Apple, Tencent or Yahoo or For E-commerce, the bar is higher with over $8 Billion. Examples- Amazon, eBay or Alibaba.

Cisco also added that by 2021, 94 percent of the workload and computing instances will be processed by cloud data centers. Cloud data centers will be contributing to a higher level of virtualization, automation, standardization and security than all other traditional data centers. According to a statement given by Cisco, cloud data centers offered an increased capacity in performance, memory, and ease of management. Virtualizations offered the hardware and software consolidation, automation and better security approach.

The overall data center workload will also increase by almost 2.3 fold from 2016 to 2021. The cloud computing will triple over the same period. Here are some more stats:

1. Big data will increase to 403 EB by 2021 up by almost eight-fold from 25 EB in 2016. Big data will hold almost 30 percent of the data in data centers that would be increased from 18 percent in 2016.

2. IoT will become a major technology that will utilize the cloud. The data created by any device will reach almost 847ZB per year by 2021.

3. SaaS will be one of the most popular cloud services with over 75 percent of the cloud workload being shifted. IaaS will see a reduction from 21 percent to 16 percent and PaaS would remain the same.

A major insurance company situated in London recently made a shift from conservative data solutions to the AWS cloud. A statement released by the “Data is lifeblood. The only way to win an insurance business is to better predict the risk of individuals or assets. It also gives an overview of growth options we can explore.”

Here are some of the cloud solution options that can suit your business requirements- AWS, Cisco, IBM, NetApp, Oracle are some of the actively used.

To know more about cloud data center solutions you can download our whitepaper.