This week, Cisco released its latest forecast on global data centre and cloud computing, covering the time period 2013 – 2014. During this time Cisco forecasts that annual data centre traffic will triple, a compound growth rate of 23%.
But to what extent is this being driven by the growth in connected devices, and the traffic they generate? The answer can be found by digging into the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) published in June. Over this period, it can be seen that the total number of IP-connected devices will increase by 67% from 12.4 billion to 20.6 billion, an increase of 8.2 billion.
Digging deeper into the numbers, shows that machine-to-machine devices will account for a full 5 billion of this incremental, growth – meaning that in excess of 60% of connectivity growth worldwide over the next five years is going to be fuelled by machine-machine devices. This is staggering, when taking into consideration the significant rate of tablet & smartphone growth expected in the massive emerging economies in Asia and Africa. The only other device category to show such impressive growth are wearables, increasing from 22m to 177m, though this will have negligible impact, as it remains less than 1% of the overall numbers.
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Source: Cisco VNI 2014
What these numbers clearly show is that not only will the increase in connected devices have a transformative effect upon the business models processes, and user experiences that can be offered, but will also be one of the principal drivers of IT and communications infrastructure over the next decade, and will need to be factored in to the way communications networks are dimensioned, particularly where mobility is involved.