Networking giant Cisco expects cloud traffic in Africa and the Middle East to more than quadruple by the end of 2019, with 83% of all data centre traffic in the region coming from the cloud.

The forecast is contained in the fifth annual Cisco Global Cloud Index (2014-2019), released on Tuesday. The index estimates global data centre and cloud-based traffic growth and trends.

Africa and the Middle East is expected to have the highest annual cloud traffic growth rate — 41% — of all regions.

Consumer traffic will represent 61% of cloud data centre traffic by 2019, compared to 30% in 2014.

Cloud traffic is expected to grow by more than 30% in every worldwide region over the next five years, said Cisco South Africa chief technology officer Vernon Thaver in a statement.

“South African enterprises and government organisations are moving from test cloud environments to trusting clouds with their mission-critical workloads,” Thaver said. “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.”

Several factors are driving cloud traffic’s accelerating growth and the transition to cloud services, including the personal cloud demands of an increasing number of mobile devices; the rapid growth in popularity of public cloud services for business; and the increased degree of virtualisation in so-called private clouds, which is increasing the density of those workloads.

“The growth of machine-to-machine connections also has the potential to drive more cloud traffic in the future,” Cisco said.

Cisco predicts that the connection of people, processes, data and things — what it calls “the Internet of everything” — will have a “significant impact on data centre and cloud traffic growth.