For its inaugural report, Cisco (News - Alert) has some promising predictions for cloud data and cloud computing, of which cloud traffic will grow 12-fold by 2015.

A release on the report, titled “Cisco Global Cloud Index,” the company says that not only will traffic grow 12-fold, the cloud will take just over half of data center workloads, clocking in at 51 percent.

The new research was based on third-party data and on 30 terabytes of data gathered from 10 data centers worldwide. Among the 10 were data centers dedicated to just a single large enterprise and others that were open to multiple enterprises.

Traffic between data centers and end users was just 18 percent of the overall traffic level in 2010, and traffic between data centers was just 5 percent for that year. Those numbers also are expected to change minimally between now and 2015, when they will be 17 percent and 7 percent respectively.

“Cloud and data center traffic is exploding, driven by user demand to access volumes of content on the devices of their choice. The result: greater data center virtualization and relevance of the network for cloud applications and the need to make sense of a dynamically evolving situation,” said Suraj Shetty (News - Alert), vice president of product and solutions marketing, in a press release.

He continued, “The Cisco Global Cloud Index provides insight into this traffic growth and trends so that organizations can make strategic long-term decisions. We will continue to develop and release the Cisco Global Cloud Index on a regular and ongoing annual basis, contributing to ‘cloud readiness’ efforts worldwide.”

In 2015, 34 percent of data center traffic will be associated with cloud-based applications, while 66 percent will be associated with traditional data center applications, Cisco predicts. In comparison, only 11 percent of data center traffic was cloud-based in 2010, while 89 percent was traditional data.

Relatedly, Forrester’s (News - Alert) report “Sizing the Cloud” predicts that the global market for cloud computing will leap from $40.7 billion to more than $241 billion in 2020.

“Our analysis shows that IaaS will reach a peak of $5.9 billion in global revenues in 2014 and will then enter a period of significant commoditization, price deterioration and margin pressure,” wrote Forrester report authors Stefan Ried, Ph.D. and Holger Kisker, Ph.D.