By 2018, half of the world’s population will have access to the Internet. And more than half of Internet users will use private cloud services. These are two conclusions of the Global Cloud Index, an annual study which covers 2013 to 2018 in its most recent version.
According to calculations by the United Nations, there will be about 7.6 billion people on the planet in 2018. This will be accompanied by a strong increase in data traffic, by the fact that more and more people will have access to the Internet. In this scenario, 53% of global Internet users will use cloud storage to store personal data in 2018. This is expected to generate 811 MB of traffic per person per month – in 2013 this figure was only 186 MB.
Data traffic generated by data processing centres is expected to triple, from 3.1 zettabytes in 2013 to 8.6 zettabytes in 2018. By 2018, cloud services are expected to be responsible for 76% of these data streams; in 2013 this figure was only 54%.
IT experts also predicts that around 70% of cloud services will be sourced from private clouds in 2018; all other services will be sourced from public clouds by public providers.