back to article Cisco: The day of PCs is passing, cloud storage will dominate by 2019

Those fumbling with PCs may want to think about updating their skills portfolio, according to a new Cisco forecast that predicts the majority of data will no longer be stored on client devices by 2019. The rise of cloud traffic will be stopped by neither the collapse of Safe Harbor nor the election of CISA, suggested Cisco's …

  1. Zog_but_not_the_first
    Boffin

    "Those fumbling with PCs may want to think about updating their skills portfolio"

    Alternatively, I'll take a bet against those predictions. Anyone giving odds?

    1. a_yank_lurker

      Re: "Those fumbling with PCs may want to think about updating their skills portfolio"

      The odds I would offer is when Cisco goes belly up with stupidity like this. Local storage is too useful to get rid of even with "cloud" storage available. What most of these morons (insult to morons) do not grasp is that different users need different mixes of local, private cloud, and public cloud.

  2. Sureo

    data "...will neither be saved nor stored..."

    Yes but will it be slurped?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Thin client. Thick client. Thin client. Thick client.

    Storage provider predicts they'll be storing everything in 4 years time.

    Ah so many things to go wrong. A breakthrough in super dense energy-efficient storage causing a computing paradigm shift, improving connectivity causing a shift away from centralisation of storage, the market rejecting the 'internet of things' outright. The millennial+1 generation deciding they really like privacy.

  4. Deltics
    FAIL

    data "...will neither be saved nor stored..."

    Um, I thought the jumping off point of the article was that data will be stored in the cloud. Which would seem to meet the definition of "stored", no ?

    And last time I looked, data save and stored in the cloud still has to be retrieved from that cloud to be acted upon in any way, even if that means streaming.. So you still need a device on which to work with or consume that data. Mobes may be great for consuming Taylor Swift and/or cat videos but they are woefully inadequate for working on proposal documents, presentations and code (you know, the stuff that creates the apps that runs on those mobes).

    Hint: A Surface Pro or a MacBook Air are still PC's, just not in the traditional 2-box+keyb+(more recently)mouse form factor.

  5. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. cbars Bronze badge

      I was of similar opinion, however the convenience of the white stuff means I still want photos etc to be instantly backed up. Hence, I now run an owncloud server. Hopefully hardened enough to stand against any non-governmental miscreants!

      Now all my calendars, contacts, photos get that instant "whoosh" to the ether, but I still have control of exactly where in the ether they go > myhouse

      1. Mage Silver badge
        Facepalm

        Cloud?

        It's 3rd party hosting.

        Been around since 1960s, but rebranded, free security agency monitoring, unknown backup and security protocols. Rental computing on less reliable connection than a leased line.

    2. chivo243 Silver badge

      Right on brother. That's what local storage is all about. I know an expansion of volume will happen soon here at the home base. I wait for the day that my library is a commodity.

      I don't fear the cloud, but I avoid it all cost.

  6. Rafael 1

    The end of PCs...

    ... flying cars, affordable and useful robots, the year of the Linux desktop, colonies on the moon, Peak Apple, Leonardo DiCaprio gets an Academy Award, end of spinning hard disks, cloning yourself for spare parts, everybody giving up on Java, end of reality shows as mankind realizes it was pointless, real quantum computing, three-day week for IT workers, teleportation of whole pizzas and not only particles that no one can see, non-dorky-looking wearable computers, invisibility cloaks, a real Wonka everlasting gobstopper.

    What else, did I miss any?

    1. ThorWarhammer

      Re: The end of PCs...

      Leonardo DiCaprio gets an Academy Award... hahaha priceless

      I'll keep my sensitive stuff on an obselete pc thankyou

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: The end of PCs...

      What else, did I miss any?

      Politicians becoming honest...

      The truth about 9/11

      The end to Global poverty.

      The end of oil.

      Bono saves Africa

    3. This post has been deleted by its author

      1. stucs201

        Re: The end of PCs...

        Practical jet-packs. Viable fusion reactors.

    4. a_yank_lurker

      Re: The end of PCs...

      No on call of IT workers.

    5. Medixstiff

      Re: The end of PCs...

      "affordable and useful robots," for sexy time right?

    6. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: The end of PCs...

      You can have the rest, but I want pizza teleportation. Where do I sign up?

    7. Les Matthew

      Re: The end of PCs...

      "What else, did I miss any?"

      Paperless office.

  7. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Happy

    I'll keep my PCs

    Just for a rainy day, you understand.

  8. Alan W. Rateliff, II
    Paris Hilton

    A couple of quick translations

    "Those working on the private cloud would also be wise to have a think about their career direction" = "Don't even think about developing skills that would compete with Us."

    "...businesses are expected to mellow in their prudish hesitation towards adopting public clouds for all but mission-critical workloads..." = "Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own."

    From the sub-title (yes, I realize after reading TFA it is not related): "16 million years worth of music streamed to your mobe annually" = "Soon your music tastes will be dictated by unknown benefactors who control the content available for streaming."

  9. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

    You can have my data

    when you pry it from my cold, dead harddrive.

    Just as Mage said (see above) - not really all that new...

  10. jgarry

    Problem is, any logical progression will be messed up by people monetizing it. Or to be precise, attempting to monetize it.

    So we have the largest search organization trying to do that with advertising, and the largest organization by capitalization attempting with subscriptioning and closed systems.

    The problem is, they are benefiting from excessive economic profit, without reaching any equilibrium.

    That's always going to be a problem when using market forces to allocate infrastructural resources. Greed considers regulation and fairness damage and routes around it.

    The world will change, but chaotically.

  11. W. Anderson

    Cisco upsetting Microsoft peons.

    The Microsofties on this TheRegister forum will go bonkers in decrying Cisco for stating the obvious on the decline of "PCs", which is the "only" area of technology that Microsoft dominates in 2015.

    In data centers, Social Media, Mobile devices, Super Computing and Scientific research, Networking and Cloud Computing, the company is playing catchup without any technological innovation to show in these areas, and worst yet, having to license and use Linux, Hadoop, Apache, PHP Scripting, FreeBSD Networking Stack and other Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) that the company just recently decried as communist, incompetent, geeky and every other pejorative term available.

    To see Microsoft eat humble pie, while also slipping into technological irrelevance is a strange sight to behold.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The reasons that this "article" just reads as ad copy

    Here are some truths, to counter the suspension of belief that permeates this "article"

    1) "businesses are expected to mellow in their prudish hesitation towards adopting public clouds for all but mission-critical workloads"

    News flash: for businesses, the vast majority of employee workloads qualify as "mission critical". If it wasn't, they would be in business in the first place, now would they? From in-house inventory management to POS to content creation, a system that isn't available when it is needed means no business gets done.

    Ask the businesses who have suffered through cloud blackouts, how that do for you?

    2) Pipe width

    It's not the data, it's how fast you can access it, stupid. And with less than 100% reliability (see clause #1) and pipe bandwidth that can NEVER approach LAN speeds, that "mission critical" data gets further and further away from being real-time usable the more you depend upon it (the more data you stuff into it).

    The pipe width will never grow as fast as the size of Big Data collection, so this problem will only grow worse with time.

    Most S3 users, like myself, are lucky to get 1MB/s up/down speeds, and they are considered the most major player. Larger local pipes increase data throughput but not at a linked, ROI-based return; spend 2x for 3x the speed, see your S3 throughput go up 1.6x or so, if you are lucky. Some S3 locations do better than that but this is what is being reported as common in the U.S.-based hosts, and if for that huge market that is the best you can do...then "cloud" is in a lot of trouble

    1. ntevanza

      Re: The reasons that this "article" just reads as ad copy

      1) unless your whole business is in one building, everything from in-house content creation to POS is already 100% dependent on 100% network uptime.

      2) the data go where the app is. If the app moves to a cloud, private or public, the data will go there. For cloudy apps, there's no need synchronously to move data over a long distance network.

      Real world example. You exchange your old, tired Oracle salesforce automation protection racket for a new shiny salesforce.com one. Your Oracle sales database goes away. Now the only thing travelling over a public network is a trickle of html. The idea that your data must travel *in production* over a WAN or public public network to get to a cloud is nonsense.

      Marc Benioff now has your data, but who cares? It's sales data, so in three months it's worthless. Let him worry about cold storage.

      The real question is thus not how synchronously to get your sales data back and forth into and out of Marc's cloud. The real question is whether your have the balls to do with your general ledger and proprietary IP what you've just done with sales. Small businesses are already doing this. Large ones may respond rudely to this question.

  13. cageordie

    Really? Really? Again?

    LOL! I must have been hearing this since maybe 1990 when the IT folks realized people were taking control away from them. Every now and again this gets rolled out and dusted off again. Remember the thin client? I saw one of the prototypes at Liberate back around y2k, they had upgraded it with a local hard disk! You expect me to put all the crap I have stored on my 8 terabytes of disk on this machine to some company in the expectation that they will keep it private. Because big companies never have security issues and are always reliable and available? LOL!

  14. StudeJeff

    This is just the latest version of the "death of the PC" proclamations that have been going around since about the time the PC was invented.

    I think about all the people who trusted their photo's to picture hosting sites that went defunct and lost their pictures, same thing can happen with cloud hosting companies.

    Cloud storage is useful, I use it myself for my home office system, but it's a backup, nothing more. If the "cloud" (that really is a silly term) company goes bust I've still got all my data and just have to find another company for backup.

    Twenty years ago people were predicting the death of the PC, and I predict that twenty years from now some of the same people (and their kids) will still be predicting the death of the PC, but the PC's soldier on.

    1. Naselus

      "Twenty years ago people were predicting the death of the PC, and I predict that twenty years from now some of the same people (and their kids) will still be predicting the death of the PC, but the PC's soldier on."

      Didn't you hear? We're apparently all going to be doing everything on tablets now. Because they've proven to be such fabulous productivity devices.

  15. Flatlander

    Cloud ha ha

    Everything here is stored on hard drives and with a maximum upload speed of 0.364mb/s (more often than not .027mb/s) that's where it's going to stay. Already closed one part of the business down as couldn't send clients files. We did try using Royal Mail but apparently that was no faster.

  16. HKmk23
    WTF?

    The end....ha - ha - ha

    Did not some other plonker from IBM say once that there would only be the need for five computers?....This comment is right up there alongside it.....I would no more put my data into the "cloud" than put my wallet in someone else's pocket for safekeeping...... the word lemmings keeps coming into my mind........

    1. StudeJeff

      Re: The end....ha - ha - ha

      The quote is supposed to be from Thomas Watson, former IBM President, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”, but there is no evidence he actually said that.

      Although in the early days it would have made a lot more sense, people had no idea what was coming.

  17. ZeroSum

    IPv6 end-user deployment in the US will be far ahead of 32% by 2019.

    To get 32% users with IPv6 worldwide they've conservatively assumed quadratic growth continues instead of a more typical S-curve technology adoption. Using the same quadratic assumption for the US projects IPv6 end-user adoption there will be about 85% by the start of 2019. That is probably an underestimate for US mobile operators as VZW is already over 70% and T-Mobile US is over 50%.

  18. HAL-9000

    I thought

    Wasn't Cisco in the shit earlier this year, with Asian sales heavily down over (trust) NSA slurping complicity. This smacks of sales suits postering, and a massive sprinkle of blue sky thinking with a hint of thought shower for good measure. I can nearly smell the eau de cologne.

  19. Dalkeith

    Or alternatively the cloud could be a useful additional thing if you don't mind increasing your attack surface to the entire world.

    I used to have one bike now I have four

    I used to have one computer I now have four

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