Bear this statistic in mind: A two-hour high-definition movie at 1080p resolution is about 8 gigs of data. 

If you were wondering why Red Hat, IBM, Cisco, NetApp, startups such as reently sold Raleigh-based CloudBearing and so many other tech firms are so enthralled with “cloud” computing, just follow the data. Cisco’s latest “Global Cloud Index” report forecasts hosted data will nearly triple over the next four years to more than 8.6 zettabytes per month. And most of that is going to the cloud, not traditional data centers.

But consumers are a big driver, too as in the “Internet of Things” explosion. Net-connected devices of all types are forecast to drive over half of net traffic by 2018. And broadband speeds will make more data accessible. Cisco expects average broadband to triple to 42 megabytes per second from some 13 mgps.

As for the public (think iCloud, Amazon) vs. private cloud business, the private sector will grow faster than shared, or so-called public clouds, predicts Cisco, which recently formed a big partnership with Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) focusing on the cloud.

These numbers as reported by Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) on Tuesday are mind-numbing – worse than trying to grasp the real size of our national debt.

A zettabyte, by the way, is a million terabytes.

A terabyte is a 1,000 gigs. A zettabyte is a million gigs.

So if a terabyte is 130 HD movies – well, you do the math.

Zettas are big, baby, as Dick Vitale would yell.

Notes Cisco: “The 8.6 zettabytes of data center traffic predicted for 2018 is equivalent to streaming all of the movies (approximately 500,000) and television shows (3 million) ever made in ultra-high definition (UHD) 250,000 times.”

Consumers worldwide will be helping drive cloud growth, but it’s on the corporate side where the cloud providers will really cash in.

“When people discuss cloud, they often focus on public cloud services or public cloud storage services. However, a very significant majority of today’s cloud workloads are actually processed in private cloud environments,” said Kelly Ahuja, Cisco’s Senior Vice President for Service Provider Business, Products, and Solutions, in the report. ”Even with public cloud workloads having significant growth, by 2018, almost 70% of cloud workloads will still be private cloud-related, requiring the ability of workloads to bridge across a hybrid private/public cloud environment,” said Kelly Ahuja, Cisco, Senior Vice President, Service Provider Business, Products, and Solutions.

But global consumer use of the cloud for movies and more is far from inconsequential.

“By 2018, 53% of all residential Internet users globally will use personal cloud storage, and the average consumer cloud storage traffic per user will be 811 megabytes per month by 2018, compared to 186 megabytes per month in 2013,” Cisco says.

Some of the Data

To help better explain what tech companies see in the cloud, here are some of the statistics as broken out in the Cisco report.

They truly are worth reading if you want to better understand the latest rage to sweep the Internet and the web.

Global Data Center Traffic

● Annual global data center IP traffic will reach 8.6 zettabytes (715 exabytes [EB] per month) by the end of 2018, up from 3.1 zettabytes (ZB) per year (255 EB per month) in 2013.
● Global data center IP traffic will nearly triple (2.8-fold) over the next 5 years. Overall, data center IP traffic willgrowata compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23 percent from 2013 to 2018.

Data Center Virtualization and Cloud Computing Growth

● By 2018, more than three quarters (78 percent) of workloads will be processed by cloud data centers; 22percent will be processed by traditional data centers.
● Overall data center workloads will nearly double (1.9-fold) from 2013 to 2018; however, cloud workloads will nearly triple (2.9-fold) over the same period.
● The workload density (that is, workloads per physical server) for cloud data centers was 5.2 in 2013 and will grow to 7.5 by 2018. Comparatively, for traditional data centers, workload density was 2.2 in 2013 and will grow to 2.5 by 2018.
Public vs. Private Cloud
● By 2018, 31 percent of the cloud workloads will be in public cloud data centers, up from 22 percent in 2013. (CAGR of 33 percent from 2013 to 2018).
● By 2018, 69 percent of the cloud workloads will be in private cloud data centers, down from 78 percent in 2013. (CAGR of 21 percent from 2013 to 2018).

Global Cloud Traffic

● Annual global cloud IP traffic will reach 6.5 ZB (541 EB per month) by the end of 2018, up from 1.6 ZB peryear (137 EB per month) in 2013.
● Global cloud IP traffic will nearly quadruple (3.9-fold) over the next 5 years. Overall, cloud IP traffic will growataCAGR of 32 percent from 2013 to 2018.
● Global cloud IP traffic will account for more than three-fourths (76 percent) of total data center traffic by 2018.
Cloud Service Delivery Models

● By 2018, 59 percent of the total cloud workloads will be Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) workloads, up from 41 percent in 2013.
● By 2018, 28 percent of the total cloud workloads will be Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) workloads, down from 44 percent in 2013.
● By 2018, 13 percent of the total cloud workloads will be Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) workloads, down from 15 percent in 2013.

Internet of Everything (IoE) Potential Impact on Cloud

● Globally, the data created by IoE devices will reach 403 ZB per year (33.6 ZB per month) by 2018, up from 113.4 ZB per year (9.4 ZB per month) in 2013.
● Globally, the data created by IoE devices will be 277 times higher than the amount of data being transmitted to data centers from end-user devices and 47 times higher than total data center traffic by 2018.
Consumer Cloud Storage
● By 2018, 53 percent (2 billion) of the consumer Internet population will use personal cloud storage, up from 38 percent (922 million users) in 2013.
● Globally, consumer cloud storage traffic per user will be 811 megabytes per month by 2018, compared to 186 megabytes per month in 2013.
 

What’s left to say but: Egad!