The Internet of Things will generate a staggering 400 zettabytes (ZB) of data a year by 2018, according to a report from Cisco. For those who came in late a zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes which, unless we got it wrong, Catherine Zeta Jones is a much bigger Welsh phenomena than Tom Jones
Cisco’s fourth annual Global Cloud Index study shows that data from devices connected to the internet will reach 403ZB a year by 2018, up from 113.4ZB a year in 2013. Cisco said that things like a Boeing 787 aircraft, which generates 40TB per hour of flight, or a Rio Tinto mining operation that can generate up to 2.4TB of data a minute.
Despite this huge growth in data from IoT devices, only a small amount will actually be sent to data centres for storage and subsequent analysis. Traffic sent to data centres to grow to 8.6ZB, up from 3.1ZB in 2013. The majority of this growth will come from cloud services, which will represent 76 percent of all data centre traffic by 2018, up from 54 percent in 2013.