Issue link: http://hub-fr.insight.com/i/532074
7 Some are fully in-sourced, built from the ground up with onsite servers, applications, network infrastructure and IT teams to manage everything in-house. Others are fully outsourced, using a combination of cloud platforms to connect a business to its data located in distant facilities. Others fall somewhere in between, a hybrid combination of cloud-based services and on-premises infrastructure and servers. Regardless of the approach, the common ground is that a virtualized data center is designed to evolve with a business. It supports a level of growth and IT flexibility that used to be inconceivable. Trend Spotting: Data, Data Everywhere Businesses around the world are using that new-found flexibility to grow their data stores as never before. In its Global Cloud Index, Cisco predicts that the world's data centers will be handling 7.7 zettabytes of data per year by 2017, nearly double what they're handling today. One zettabyte is one billion terabytes. Even if it's just a bunch of 1's and 0's, that's a boatload of data, and it's growing with no end in sight. Where's it coming from? And more importantly, where are the servers that will handle it? Cisco divides all of that data center traffic into three classes: traffic that stays in the data center (76 per cent), traffic that flows between data centers (7 per cent), and traffic that flows from the data center to consumers over the internet or network (17 per cent). Here's a fact that hits home: Put all that data center traffic together, and in 2011, 70 per cent of it was handled in on-premises data centers. By 2017, only 31 per cent will be handled at an organization's physical site, leaving 69 per cent to be handled in the cloud.