According to the Global Cloud Index report, the amount of IP traffic based on the cloud will rise from 3.9 to 14.1 zettabytes by 2020, while the amount of traffic passing through the traditional enterprise data center will reach 1.3 zettabytes (compared to 827 exabytes in 2015). This probably means that only 8% of workloads will be managed in traditional data centers, while the remainder will be housed in hyperscale data center and cloud. The growth of the public cloud, according to analysts, will travel faster than the private cloud: 68% of cloud workloads fact reside in the data center to the public cloud (compared to 45% in 2015), while 32% will be hosted in private cloud data centers (compared with 51% last year).

Between 2015 and 2020, Cisco believes that the number of data centers hyperscale in the world will increase from 259 to 485 and, at the same time, traffic addressed to them will quintuple. According to analysts, in addition, in 2020 the facilities hyperscale will host about 47% of installed servers in data centers around the world and will support 53% of all traffic in the data center.

A more modest change, according to experts, instead involve the scope of the Internet of Things. It provides for the IoT, along with analytical tools and database workloads, will correspond to 22% of all business workloads (2% more than in 2015). Although it is recognized that the Internet of Things will be the source of huge amounts of data from a growing number of devices connected to the network, at this stage it is not yet clear how much of this information will be stored in the data center and how many will instead be treated locally on the devices. From what we read in the report, globally, the generated data (but not necessarily stored) by IoT grow to 600 ZB year by 2020, an increase of 275 times higher than the expected traffic passing by data centers to users / devices.