I knew the cloud was growing, but according to research done by Cisco, it’s growing much faster than I thought. Of course I’m not really that surprised that so many companies are opting to use cloud computing services like our Hosted Call Center solution, but Cisco is estimating that cloud traffic will increase 12-fold by 2015. That’s huge.
The report also says that data center traffic will increase by four times, that’s also pretty impressive. Cisco is of course the company that provides most of the hardware and software for companies that offer cloud computing services, including us here at Telax.
It does make sense that as new technology improves and becomes more well-known, more companies are going to use it. While cloud computing has existed for some time now, it’s really only hit the spot light recently, and of course the there was some scepticism at first. But there’s going to be scepticism any time someone claims to be able to save a company huge sums of money.
People have spent decades in the contact center industry maintaining their own hardware and software. It’s difficult to believe that all the hard work and headaches associated with managing a PBX and an in-house data center can be handed off to a hosted solution provider for a fraction of the cost. Many things that sound too good to be true are too good to be true, but Cisco seems to have proven that cloud computing is what it seems: a reliable and inexpensive option.
To put the traffic we’ll see in the coming years into perspective, here are the numbers from the Cisco study. In 2010 global cloud traffic reached 130 exabytes, which is one million terabytes (a terabyte is 1000 gigabytes). That’s quite a large amount of traffic, but by 2015, Cisco expects the yearly traffic to reach 1.6 zettabytes. A zettabyte is 1000 exabytes. I had to look up zettabyte on Wikipedia to write this article. And here’s the kicker to really put things in perspective, in 2009 the entire Internet (that’s right all of it) consisted of only 500 exabytes.
As of yet, no storage system has been built that can hold a zettabyte, but we might need one by 2015. Thankfully, there has been progress made on hard drive technology recently, which you can read about in a previous blog post here.
Tags: business community, call center, call center software, cloud computing, contact center, data center, exabyte, hosted call center, telax, telax hosted call ceter, zettabyte