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You don’t need Sherlock Holmes to tell you that cloud computing is on the rise, and that cloud traffic keeps going up. However, it is enlightening to see the degree by which it is increasing, which is, in essence, about to quadruple in the next few years. By that time, 92% percent of workloads will be processed by cloud data centers; versus only eight percent being processed by traditional data centers.

Cisco, which does a decent job of measuring such things, just released estimates that shows cloud traffic likely to rise 3.7-fold by 2020, increasing 3.9 zettabytes (ZB) per year in 2015 (the latest full year data for which data is available) to 14.1 ZB per year by 2020.

The big data and associated Internet of Things are a big part of this growth, the study’s authors state. By 2020, database, analytics and IoT workloads will account for 22% of total business workloads, compared to 20% in 2015. The total volume of data generated by IoT will reach 600 ZB per year by 2020, 275 times higher than projected traffic going from data centers to end users/devices (2.2 ZB); 39 times higher than total projected data center traffic (15.3 ZB).

As the Cisco team explains it, much of the shift to public cloud will likely be part of hybrid cloud strategies. For example, “cloud bursting is an example of hybrid cloud where daily computing requirements are handled by a private cloud, but for sudden spurts of demand the additional traffic demand — bursting — is handled by a public cloud.”

The Cisco estimates also show that while Software as a Service (SaaS, for online applications) will keep soaring, there will be less interest in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS, for online servers, capacity, storage).  By 2020, 74% of the total cloud workloads will be software-as-a-service (SaaS) workloads, up from 65% at this time. Platform as a Service (PaaS, for development tools, databases, middleware) also will see a boost — eight percent of the total cloud workloads will be PaaS workloads, down from nine percent in 2015. However,  IaaS workloads will total 17% of the total cloud workloads, down from 26%.

The Cisco analysts explain that the lower percentage growth for IaaS may be attributable to the growing shift away from private cloud to public cloud providers. For starters, IaaS was far less disruptive to the business — a rearrangement of data center resources, if you will. As SaaS offerings gain in sophistication, those providers may offer IaaS support behind the scenes. “In the private cloud, initial deployments were predominantly IaaS. Test and development types of cloud services were the first to be used in the enterprise; cloud was a radical change in deploying IT services, and this use was a safe and practical initial use of private cloud for enterprises. It was limited, and it did not pose a risk of disrupting the workings of IT resources in the enterprise. As trust in adoption of SaaS or mission-critical applications builds over time with technology enablement in processing power, storage advancements, memory advancements, and networking advancements, we foresee the adoption of SaaS type applications to accelerate over the forecast period, while shares of IaaS and PaaS workloads decline.”

On the consumer side, video and social networking will lead the increase in consumer workloads. By 2020, consumer cloud storage traffic per user will be 1.7 GB per month, compared to 513 MB per month in 2015. By 2020, video streaming workloads will account for 34% of total consumer workloads, compared to 29% in 2015. Social networking workloads will account for 24% of total consumer workloads, up from 20 percent in 2015.  In the next four years, 59% (2.3 billion users) of the consumer Internet population will use personal cloud storage up from 47% (1.3 billion users) in 2015.

This article was originally published on www.forbes.com and can be viewed in full here

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