Enabling data density for a digital future
There’s no shortage of statistics acknowledging the scale of the challenge posed by global consumption of data and they are all pretty daunting. The latest Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2016–2021 predicts that business IP traffic will grow at a CAGR of 21% from 2016 to 2021. Increased adoption of advanced video communications will be itself responsible for a threefold increase in business IP traffic over the same time frame.
To give some indication of the enterprise shift to web-based applications and Software as a Service (SaaS), the Cisco report highlights that business internet traffic will grow at more than double the pace of IP WAN. Specifically, IP WAN will grow at a CAGR of 10%, compared with a CAGR of 20% for fixed line business internet traffic and 41% for mobile business internet traffic. This last statistic really shows the impact that wireless is having on the working environment.
There are a few insights that can be gleaned from this information. One is that despite the fact that internet applications are significant, and in some cases dominant, they do not account for the totality of traffic and will not for the foreseeable future. This means hybrid infrastructure will continue to be the norm, driving increased demand for both private WAN and internet/cloud connectivity, and in the latter case, connectivity into multiple clouds.
This speaks to the complex nature of digital transformation. The criticality of global interconnection with parallel access to premises infrastructure and cloud-hosted services stresses the vital importance of the network for survival.
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