The Middle East and Africa (MEA) region is expected to see an exponential growth in data centre traffic, spurred by organisations' rapid migration to cloud architectures.

This is according to the sixth annual Cisco Global Cloud Index (2015-2020), which notes that globally, cloud traffic is expected to rise 3.7-fold, up from 3.9 zettabytes (ZB) per year in 2015 to 14.1ZB per year by 2020.

With greater virtualisation, Cisco says, cloud operators are also able to achieve greater operational efficiencies while flexibly delivering a growing variety of services to businesses and consumers with optimal performance.

"The IT industry has taken cloud computing from an emerging technology to an essential scalable and flexible networking solution," says Andy MacDonald, VP for global service providers for MEA and Russia at Cisco.

"With large global cloud deployments, operators are optimising their data centre strategies to meet the growing needs of businesses and consumers. In the six years of this study, cloud computing has advanced from an emerging technology to an essential scalable and flexible part of architecture for service providers."

In MEA, Cisco points out data centre traffic will reach 328 exabytes per year (27 exabytes per month) by 2019, up from 82 exabytes per year (6.8 exabytes per month) in 2014. It adds traffic grew 40% in 2014, up from 59 exabytes per year (4.9 exabytes per month) in 2013.

The networking company notes 59.9% of data centre traffic in the region will remain within the data centre by 2019, compared to 74% in 2014, while 33% of data centre traffic will travel to end-users by 2019, compared to 18.9% in 2014.

It adds consumer data centre traffic will represent 65% of total data centre traffic by 2019, compared to 32% in 2014.

Regarding cloud traffic, Cisco says cloud data centre traffic in MEA will represent 86% of total data centre traffic by 2019, compared to 61% in 2014. The traffic will reach 280 exabytes per year (23 exabytes per month) by 2019, up from 50 exabytes per year (4.2 exabytes per month) in 2014.

The company also predicts cloud data centre traffic to grow 5.6-fold by 2019, at a CAGR of 41% from 2014 to 2019.

Globally, and for the first time, Cisco also quantified and analysed the impact of hyper-scale data centres. These data centres are expected to grow from 259 in 2015 to 485 by 2020. Hyper-scale data centre traffic is projected to quintuple over the next five years. It believes these infrastructures will account for 47% of total data centre installed servers and support 53% of all data centre traffic by 2020.