How a Growth in Bandwidth is Helping the Cloud to Grow

By in Articles Posted on

For those people who remember the days when broadband first hit the scene, plans came with data quotas that were extremely strict, if you strayed over then you had to pay or be moved to a plan with slower speeds. As the infrastructure improved the restrictions on allowances were relaxed and it is now common to see high-speed broadband with no allowances.

When it comes to businesses using the cloud, where do they stand when it comes to data transfer and limits?

With new technology comes more data

As new technology is released, this leads to an increase in demand for business services. When it comes to bandwidth, there has been a significant increase in digital assets from emails to documents and photo’s, all of this requires more storage which means a larger network capacity in order to move the data around.

The Visual Networking Index report from Cisco suggests that annual global IP traffic will move past the zettabyte threshold and by 2019 it will surpass the 2 zettabyte mark. Over the past five years, global IP traffic has risen at an incredible rate and most of this growth is down to the increased use of video subscriptions from consumers and communication services by businesses but it has also been caused by the use of smartphones and tablets. In the next few years, internet traffic will come to a significant turning point because it will see more traffic coming from wireless and mobile devices than wired devices.  By 2019, wired devices will only make up 33% of the IP traffic and Wi-Fi and mobile devices will make up the remaining percentage.

To keep up with this kind of growth, cloud providers are offering increased data transfer limits at faster speeds which get the most from on-demand infrastructure and applications.

Adopt and Innovate

A large number of businesses will become mobile over the next few years which means they will have to handle an increase in digital assets and this will lead to cloud providers that offer large transfer allowances having to implement new technology and ideas.

There are many businesses that struggle to use the cloud to its full potential because of the restrictions that they place on data transfer and  to add to this it is common for those applications that are bandwidth intensive to be seen as not usable as they are not supported on the hosted infrastructure.

To highlight a few, high data transfer allowances open the cloud up to:

  • Data Protection: Backups are often seen as blockers for cloud adoption because the organisation cannot defend the costs that come with transferring data.
  • HD Video: This is a massive consumer of bandwidth which means that organisations can develop the technology using high data transfer capacities.
  • It is still common for data to be held in plain text formats, but moves forward in the technology available for visualisation now means that digital assets can now be seen an and heard, this will mean that visualisation will also require an increase in the volume of data that can be transferred.

There is the scope available for more applications and services but these depend on the business case and the ideas that its creator has.

A number of web hosts are now increasing their virtual server data transfer allowances considerably because the cloud is going to lead innovation which means that it should not be hampered by limits.

Opening up the access to technology leads to better innovation and service level which means that by improving access to the cloud can certainly speed up the future.