Traditional datacentres to host just 6% of workloads by 2021, predicts Cisco

The growing demand for public cloud means just 6% of applications and workloads will be processed in private datacentres by 2021, Cisco has predicted.

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The networking giant’s seventh annual Cisco Global Cloud Index report shines a light on how demand for cloud will affect datacentre traffic levels in both private and hyperscale facilities between 2016 and 2021.

According to its findings, the percentage of workloads and compute instances processed by cloud datacentres will rise to 94% over the next three years.

During the same period, the density of workloads and compute instances in cloud datacentres will increase from 8.8 in 2016 to 13.2 by 2021.

The report also suggests that the density of workloads and compute instances in traditional datacentres will rise too, but only from 2.4 to 3.8 over the forecasting period.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) will account for 75% of these cloud workloads and instance types by 2021, with infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in second place (16%) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) third (9%).

To accommodate this surge in demand, the number of hyperscale datacentres around the world will nearly double by 2021 to 628, up from 338 in 2016, says the report.

These hyperscale facilities will also house 55% of all datacentre traffic by 2021, rising from 39% in 2016, and will be home to 53% of the world’s servers, up from 27% in 2016.  

The report attributes these trends to the growing demand for cloud-based services from both businesses and consumers, with the latter group’s fervent use of social networking sites, video streaming and other internet-based services flagged as particularly significant.

Where enterprises are concerned, it is their use of cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools, collaboration platforms and analytics services that is said to be driving demand for cloud datacentres.

On the back of all these trends, the report predicts that, between 2016 and 2021, global cloud datacentre traffic will have increased from 6.0 to 19.5 zettabytes, which equates to a compound annual growth rate of 27%.