IDC: By 2021, Data Stored in Public Cloud Will Surpass Traditional Data Centers — “All in Cloud” Is the Trend

According to well‑known research firm IDC, by 2021 the total volume of data stored in public clouds worldwide will exceed that stored in traditional data centers. The monopoly that conventional data centers have had on enterprise data since the 1960s will be broken by the cloud, and enterprises will enter an “All in Cloud” era.

IDC forecasts that global data volume is entering an explosive growth phase, rising from 33 ZB in 2018 to 175 ZB by 2025. One of the key drivers of this growth is cloud computing, with its elasticity, on‑demand usage, and pay‑as‑you‑go pricing. Cloud data centers are becoming the new repositories for enterprise data. The year 2021 is expected to be a turning point: the amount of data stored in the cloud will surpass that in traditional data centers.

As cloud‑migration solutions become easier and safer, “All in Cloud” has already become a reality for enterprises around the world.

As early as 2008, Netflix began abandoning high‑end Oracle databases and top‑tier hardware, migrating to Amazon AWS instead. This move underpinned more than a thousand‑fold growth over the following decade.

A Deutsche Bank report notes that 84% of Chinese enterprises now plan to move to the cloud and believe that cloud is the future.

“All in Cloud” is especially visible on Alibaba Cloud. Leading Chinese cloud storage provider 115 Technology migrated all of its company data to Alibaba Cloud, completing the largest public‑cloud data migration in internet history, with a total volume of more than 100 PB.

Alibaba was also the first to explicitly propose “All in Cloud”. In March of this year, Zhang Jianfeng, President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, stated that the era of full‑site cloudification has arrived and that the entire Alibaba ecosystem will go All in Cloud, becoming a “Cloud‑based Alibaba”.

The move to cloud is also changing how Wall Street evaluates companies: a strong cloud strategy is seen as the hallmark of an advanced enterprise; without cloud, a company is still viewed largely as a traditional player in terms of technology adoption. The success of startups—especially unicorns—is now tightly bound to the cloud.

Snap, for example, explicitly stated in its 2017 IPO prospectus that it planned to spend USD 2 billion on Google Cloud services and more than USD 1 billion on AWS services over the following five years to signal its cloud commitment to Wall Street.

Semiconductor and IT companies like HP and Intel helped create Silicon Valley, while the new generation of unicorns—such as Airbnb, Pinterest, and Lyft—have all grown up on the cloud. In China, nearly half of domestic unicorns have also deployed their core businesses on Alibaba Cloud.