What is putting the load out there? Cloud traffic is “…largely generated by storage, production and development data in a virtualized environment” and “used in activities that are virtually invisible to individuals,” the report says.  An additional 7 percent, “primarily driven by data replication and software-system updates,” will flow between data centers. The remaining 17 percent of this traffic will come from end users’ multimedia and project-oriented cloud services.

Of course a network company sponsors this report, so take that with a grain of salt.  I’m not sure that anyone who understands anything about cloud computing would predict anything different.  The trouble comes in when enterprise IT shops are ill-prepared to support this load, and must either limit traffic or pay for very expensive network upgrades.

Cloud computing systems, at their essence, are complex, distributed systems where the network becomes the thing that allows all of the distributed components to communicate.  Thus, more clouds, more network traffic.  So, prepare for it.