Cisco: PC storage soon to be thing of the past

More personal data to be stored in the cloud than on PCs in just four years

Cisco has claimed that within four years, less than half of stored data will reside on PCs, as users opt for cloud-based options instead.

According to its latest Global Cloud Index report, Cisco claims that cloud is "becoming mainstream" globally, sounding the death knell for PC storage.

At the moment, almost three quarters (73 per cent) of data stored on client devices resides on PCs, but by 2019, this will all change and the majority (51 per cent) of stored data will move to non-PCs such as smartphones and tablets.

This, Cisco claims, means cloud will boom.

By the end of 2019, global cloud traffic will more than quadruple, from 2.1ZB to 8.6ZB. This will outpace the growth of total datacentre traffic which will only triple during the same time frame.

It said personal cloud demands and the booming popularity of cloud in the business space is behind the cloudy surge.

"The Global Cloud Index highlights the fact that cloud is moving well beyond a regional trend to becoming a mainstream solution globally, with cloud traffic expected to grow more than 30 per cent in every worldwide region over the next five years," said Doug Webster, vice president of service provider marketing at Cisco.

"Enterprise and government organisations are moving from test cloud environments to trusting clouds with their mission-critical workloads. At the same time, consumers continue to expect on-demand, anytime access to their content and services nearly everywhere. This creates a tremendous opportunity for cloud operators, which will play an increasingly relevant role in the communications industry ecosystem."