Cloud traffic to quadruple by 2017

By now, the cloud is a central component to conversations happening in IT departments across the country. The benefits are well known and the reach of the platform continues to spread. As a recent study shows, this could only be the beginning of cloud adoption.

According to a recent article form CIO, by 2017 cloud traffic could be set to quadruple and reach 5.3 zettabytes. That number comes from the third annual Global Cloud Index forecast. Currently, traffic is at 1.2 zettabytes a year which breaks down to 476 billion GB a month. 

The study also found that 75 percent of that traffic will originate from data centers that are used to generate storage, production and development data in the virtual environment. It will also be used in activities that are not directly visible to individuals.

The piece features an interview with Gerardo Dada, the senior director of product marketing at Rackspace. He mentioned that organizations need to be aware of how the landscape is changing. On top of that it may be a smarter decision for companies to partner with an IT consulting firm that specializes in deploying a cloud database, instead of trying to go at it alone.

"Digital interactions are becoming essential for all kinds of business and social activities, and customer expectations have changed," Dada says. "As users consume rich media on their own terms, bandwidth requirements change. Companies are realizing it's more efficient and more cost effective to allow a specialist hosting/cloud service provider to run their high-bandwidth, complex, global Web properties than trying to figure things out on their own."